Archive for the ‘My work’ Category
My first project in a nutshell
In a nutshell, my first project for this MA is to create a web application to aid the process of curating an exhibition.
Basically it will allow a curator or a ‘panel’ of curators to:
- Issue a ‘call for submissions’ for an exhibition
- Receive submissions of images, multimedia and descriptions of work through the web
- Rate and rank the work submitted to aid their decision making process (this is the interesting bit!)
- Present the work via the web (as a compliment to a show or event in a physical space) or as a stand alone item
That’s it! Easy to say, difficult to execute. So far I’ve got point 4 under control. Point 3 is where all my research is going right now.
Japanese Woodblock animation
[Click the image above to see the animation...]
From the Flash training day on 15th Oct.
I haven’t done any pure animation in Flash for some time so it was fun to play with this. Here’s my effort from the day. I used the vCam component that Sam showed me to try and fake that hand-held camera look that you see all over the telly and films etc.
The images were sourced from Visipix.com which is a free image library. They have some digitized archive material including lots of Japanese Wood Blocks.
Cost per user – possibly £100 or more – but that’s OK
This is a new site that I helped put together for the National Archives.
It allows people to explore and learn about Latin Palaeography – the transcription of historical documents written in Latin.
As you might imagine, this is a very niche market. But TNA (the National Archives’ abbreviation for themselves) were prepared to back it with lots of resources and engaged my company with another, Kanoti, (acting in consortium) to develop three flash learning activities and the microsite itself.
Site launches
The last couple of weeks have been very busy. Several new sites went live:
This is a kids site that promotes German language learning and cultural exchange with Germany. It’s actually a refresh of a site we did a few years ago.
A small blog to promote the State of the World Atlas series – pretty much a vehicle for the author. This is built using our own CMS Content Curator rather than an off the shelf blog. This allows us to integrate some of the functionality and content of the publisher’s own site www.myriadeditions.com (also on the same CMS)
A site for the River and Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames. Just about Olympic rowing really. There’s a javascript based timeline in there which was a bit of a mare to make. Getting the thing to work in all web browsers was practically impossible! I did get there in the end but resented the development time needed.
The Last Women
This is a screen grab from a recent project that is just about to be launched into the world. It’s interesting in that it has shaken up some of my usual practice. Over the last few years I’ve been going for cleaner and cleaner layouts, with most of the emphasis on accessibility. My client for this project, Triangle Theatre, really pushed for a more visual and layered approach, which at first I resisted. But when I caved in and started to explore the visual possibilities, I actually found I was liking the site more and more.
So the next step is to find ways to preserve accessibility of a site but to regain the rich visual possibilities that I’d laregly abandoned. To this end, I think that I may need to move away from concepts of “inclusive” design and instead start exploring “user configured” design. By this I mean that a site could be made capable of changing its appearance according to the needs of the user – so those with unimpaired vision can enjoy a rich design, but those with poor vision could choose a simpler interface. Dyslexic readers can choose a low-contrast, blue or yellow backgrounded, view while poor-sighted viewers can go for larger type and maxiumum contrast.
The technical requirements for this kind of thing aren’t too difficult in this day and age of CSS layouts and semantic site construction. However, the real issue is how to communicate effectively to the user that they can customise the site for themselves.
This is where the challenge lies…
