Ways to help think through ideas and compelling ways to communicate them. Being a visual person myself, I have always doodled on paper when I am trying to figure an idea out. Projects like web site design or CDROM interfaces do not just result in visual designs but complex arrangements of links between different data. Developing concepts for these types of 'new media' projects will inevitably include representing the designs (both style and structure) visually. To help us design for the computer as medium there are some good techniques for building visual representations, and some very powerful software tools are available.
My art school teacher and friend, Robert Janz, once complained of a museum where he had seen a Chinese scroll painting mounted in a glass cabinet. Only one small section of the landscape narrative was ever visible to the viewers and the kinetic experience was lost. I was reminded of this when I started to think about the way we scroll our web browsers to see the content ‘below the fold’ of our computer screens and digital handhelds. It seems that we are happy to have the choice to scroll a lot but we don’t want to be forced scroll a little bit! Has the Ancient Chinese way of presenting narrative through the scrolling painting resurfaced in a new digital paradigm?
A talk to a delegation of Chinese publishing executives introducing the broad range of activities and issues around the idea of the computer as publishing medium.
Electronic Publishing can mean many things to many different people. It can include ebooks, web sites, desktop publishing, computer games, interactive television,talking books and new technologies such as g3 phones and PDA (Personal Digital Assistants).
Recent comments on the last post have prompted me to look again at this Netscape 4 issue. It turns out that there are still some people around who are using Netscape version 4, in spite of the fact that it was released in 1997 (5 years ago!). Netscape is currently freely available version 7.
I suspect that many web designers don’t have a copy of Netscape version 4 knocking around. I suggest that all web designers dust off any old pentiums or PowerPCs and install a copy of the old browsers.
What’s that? You lost the old browser software installers?
Between 1975 and 1989 I formed a collection of photographs of megalithic sites around the British Isles. For several summers I travelled the British Isles taking black and white and colour photographs. The original idea was to follow the list from ‘Megalithic Sites’, Alexander Thom, OUP, 1967. Many of the photographs have been published over the years, but how I wish the Internet existed in those days. Well, in fact, I wish desktop / laptop computers were available then. I spent hours in the darkroom (I can smell the chemicals now) crafting beautiful black and white photographic prints, many were exhibited.
