Thank you to all the entries. It was a difficult choice among many fine designs.

I owe it to all of you to explain the rationale behind choosing the winner:

1. Structure: We need a design that would allow us to work with a content management system and divide the page into discrete modules that could be coded separately. The three column structure (as opposed to two column) allowed us to use the left for area-specific navigation whereas the right side column would be reserved for site-wide navigation. The center column would be reserved for product information, and merchandising.

2. Color: The winning design took alot of risk with color. Criticism here of his color choices ranged from "I hate the color brown" to "those tabs look like a box of crayons" so these choices were not without risk. We studied this and conducted informal polls. We even produced variations on Synotic's colored tabs and his brown background in-house to see if we couldn't do better. And in the end we decided that Synotics colors warmed up the page and allowed the center of the page to pop out in front instead of competing with the main content.

3. Design Detail: The winning design exhibited an attention to detail not shown in many of the other designs. The drop shadows on the edges of the center column, the rounded corners on the merchandising chips, the gradation of color in the tabs all expressed a sensitivity to detail that is to be commended. In short Synotic submitted a finished design where many others were flat and unfinished.

4. Branding: Synotic messed with our logo, but not much. We saw it in black and we saw it on paper and in the end we rejected both of these variations. We will use his design with our red and blue logo on a white background. We'd like to experiment with different treatments of the logo in time, but for now we needed a design that gave our logo a position of prominence on the upper left of the page and did not crowd it. Synotic's design accomplished all of that.

I could go on, but I think you get the idea. Once again thank you to everyone who entered and please look for other contests by jengel199 in the future. Also, you can find me by writing to jengel @ paper.com in the future.

I just added a second contest to Sitepoint called "Catholic Church Homepage Must Be Divinely Inspired" in case any of you want to try your hand in this second contest.

I think you are an excellent group of designers and I am blown away with the quality of the work.

(I should know because I founded and ran a 162 person web design firm designing websites for Sony and General Electric to the World Wrestling Federation.)

The quality of some of this week's designs is top-rate.

Next week is Spring Break and I am out of the office. For those of you who have become accustomed to seeing 20 pages of comments per day from me, next week you will get a break.

I would like to hear from all of you what designs you like best among what has been submitted.

You might hear in this space comments from one or more of my partners while I am away, but I doubt it.

Thank you. My grandfather, Eugene Casey, was one of the great industrial designers of the 20th century. He came out of Raymond Loewy's (http://www.raymondloewy.com) shop before starting his own. He is responsible for the Merrill Lynch bull logo and the green American Express card. I worked for his firm and I've worked with design platforms that brought about great design. Let's create a SEMINAL design here. I am hoping that this brief together with the feedback I leave each day does not muddy the process but helps clarify the goals of the Paper.com marketing team.

some comments from John and Peter at Paper.com on other ecommerce sites out there we are looking at:

http://www.tollbrothers.com
Peter writes: The different areas "pop" from the background, which we could
implement but I think the look in general is too upscale for paper.com.
John writes: I do not like this design. I think our nav needs are different. I think our audience is different. I think we do not have the same need for geographical based nav which is what dominated the top of this page. This page bores me. Paper is creative and colorful.

http://www.clasohlson.se/Product/Ca…?id=251614
Peter writes: "Popping" off the background again, but subtle. Serious website with
no nonsense appeal. It's a look. Builds confidence and so on. Perfect
for office supplies, but for scrapbooking?

John writes: Totally agree. It works for office supplies but not school, wedding, scrapbooking or the creative community. Does not work for the female community.

http://www.express.ebay.com/
Peter writes: A simple site with roughly as many stores/sections as future paper.com.

John writes: I think this is a very nice design. What strikes me is that the search is layered on top of the Header nav and it works very well. Is not flat or boring. And, the nav is sufficiently intuitive.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/
Peter says: I think gets the job done, but
the overall impressing is a bit hard and masculine. Perfect for what
they're selling, but maybe I'd soften the looks for paper.com.

John writes: Totally agree with this statement. This is hard, and cluttered, and the opposite direction of where we are going.

http://www.newegg.com/
Peter says Ditto.

John says, Yes, while more designed than Tiger, it is still hard, masculine, techy, and thumbnail image heavy. Can you say Dollar Store?

http://www.jampaper.com/
Peter: It looks to me like this is our direct
competition. Doesn't look like they have nearly as many SKUs as
paper.com and that might help contain the navigation.

John says, Yes, agree with both those statements. They are a boutique player. Never seen them before. I do not like this design.

http://www.paperworks.com/page/pape…alty-Paper
Peter says: A proprietary look, indeed. Who are these guys, anyway?

John says: I do not like this design because it goes too far to be proprietary and unique, but ultimately makes it look like a boutique.

Flash is allowed.

The reason I asked for Photoshop is because this is primarily a design exercise, an exercise in organizing an ecommerce offering for maximum sales, and I did not want to make this a contest of animators or coders.

That being said, I added HTML because some people would prefer to work that way and they might be able to demonstrate a particular efficiency. An efficient, beautiful HTML page is already so much closer to market than the .PSD that my programmers have to cut up and make efficient. One is the underpainting and the other is the finished fresco.

I think that the best ecommerce sites make judicious use of flash in for merchandising products.
It might be more efficient to show 3 products in one space (rotating) than 3 products in 3 spaces.
I would encourage use of Flash, but I would not make the navigation dependent upon it and the search engines don't like it.