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.
When sites go dark, what remains will be the difference between the country getting behind the internet companies and hating them for causing disruption.
The blackout page needs to do three things:
1) making people understand the SOPA proponents made the site go dark (and not Reddit etc.)
2) make people understand just one thing about why SOPA is dangerous
3) make people take some form of action to help prevent SOPA (sign a petition etc.)
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.
We tried to do that with http://sopablackout.org. Granted, this drop shadow implementation will get people's attention more, but we wanted to focus on allowing people to learn why the site is blocked.
So I don't have to change the sites manually I check the date. Here is a snippet of php code to check the date and only include your .js on Jan 18, 2012:
I made an overlay version of the spotlight effect that still allows the site to function, if you like the effect but don't like the total blackout: https://github.com/nitrogenlogic/stop-sopa (there's also a nice dark version available in the dark branch).
When sites go dark, what remains will be the difference between the country getting behind the internet companies and hating them for causing disruption.
The blackout page needs to do three things:
1) making people understand the SOPA proponents made the site go dark (and not Reddit etc.)
2) make people understand just one thing about why SOPA is dangerous
3) make people take some form of action to help prevent SOPA (sign a petition etc.)
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.