This is a really nice design but it's missing an important opportunity to convert what will initially be shock and irritation into sympathy and action.<p>When sites go dark, what remains will be the difference between the country getting behind the internet companies and hating them for causing disruption.<p>The blackout page needs to do three things:<p>1) making people understand the SOPA proponents made the site go dark (and not Reddit etc.)<p>2) make people understand just one thing about why SOPA is dangerous<p>3) make people take some form of action to help prevent SOPA (sign a petition etc.)<p>It's tough but it also has to do all of this in about 20s while people landing on it reel from the shock that Reddit / Twitter / Tumblr etc. have gone.
As user of NoScript [1] (and its Chromium sidekick, ScriptNo), I'm often let down by pages posted to hacker news that have poor or no graceful degradation [2], and that often makes me feel like writing a comment complaining about it (which I haven't, <i>won't</i>, at least as long as I don't start offering quick fixes along with the complaint).<p>It's really refreshing to see a page of such a design complexity having given thought to scenarios where javascript might not be available. Kudos! (I actually have a hunch this default state was crafted with mobile browsers in mind — but it was nonetheless a thoughtful thing.)<p>[1] <a href="http://noscript.net/" rel="nofollow">http://noscript.net/</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/graceful.failure.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/g...</a>
It's nifty, but difficult to use, to read the actual "meat" of the page. Perhaps the spotlight should be a bit larger?<p>And this is a total picked nit, but the kerning of SOP A is killing me. Wrap that P in a <span> and letter-spacing it, pleeeease.
It's cool but I feel like the gymnastics takes away a bit from the message. I prefer something plain, simple and not entertaining. Give them the message and tell them to call their legislator. The point to me is that the site is down, not that the site is interesting.
Slow and barely usable in stock Android Gingerbread and Honeycomb browsers, as well as Firefox mobile. Massive clipping errors in stock ICS browser render it unusable. Opera Mobile manages about the best, ignoring the lighting outright.<p>Hover effects really don't translate well to touchscreens.
Very clever, but that was horribly slow for me and as soon as I moved the mouse on the screen the spotlight moved so I was no longer able to read the text.<p>Let's just keep this simple, do away with the mousemove following spotlight altogether, if you want to make the page more interesting then embed a youtube video explaining the issue.<p>The text is kind of hard to read too. Personally I would just do a white background with dark text and possibly an amusing cartoon image or something to visually illustrate the concept of a blackout.
Nicely done... I just updated my Drupal blackout module to use it.<p><a href="https://github.com/mcantelon/drupal-sopa-blackout" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mcantelon/drupal-sopa-blackout</a>
I think you should probably shy away from wording like 'vast majority of Americans' -- that might be consensus on the interwebs, but it's still a bit hyperbolic for something this serious.<p>Very nice bit of code, though; especially the thrown shadow :)
FWIW, this page does not render at all on my Galaxy Nexus. Comes up as a black box in a grey box in the corner of the screen.<p>Does it look OK on other mobile browsers? Seems like mobile browser support would be important for this "template"?
Absolutely stunning effect - nicely done. Just a small report - using Chrome 16.0.912.75 on Windows 7, waving the mouse around absolutely kills my CPU - the browser process uses 75% of one core.
don't get me wrong. the idea is great, the effect is awesome.<p>but we have to reach as many people as possible. i think a plain site with the message would be more effective.