Fall Term Project

Introduction

As mentioned in the course syllabus, there are two term projects. They are designed to provide you with an opportunity to refine your skills and produce more polished work. A difficult problem with a “foundation course” such as this is providing a balance between depth and breadth. On one hand, the course covers important theory and practice in the areas of Web authoring, image processing, multimedia scripting, digital video, digital audio, photography, and vector graphics. Any one of these could easily consume an entire term. On the other hand, you need to begin to develop proficiency in every one of these areas. This requires the opportunity to practice techniques, revisit problems, and improve the quality of your work. Not providing opportunities to assess and improve your work by allowing you to work on similar problems with increasing expectations is a common problem in foundation level courses. Students who must quickly produce many small projects over a short period of time often become convinced that the reason to do projects are to get them done quickly and forget about them in order to move on to the next project. The projects and the marks they produce become the goals themselves instead of an excuse to explore and systematically experiment. This is also unlike work in industry where you must work in a team to meet customer needs and get paid.

The two term projects are designed to give you an opportunity to critically evaluate your previous work and improve on it and to begin to develop a more critical approach to your work.

Fall Term Project:

Web site redesign: due first class in January, written statement due by end of exam week.

As a byproduct of this course and others you have already built your own Web site on the imagearts server. In project 7 you were asked to develop a prototype for a redesigned site. It is time to apply what you learned during this process and throughout the year and actually redevelop you entire Web site. To do this you must:

·        in context of the work you have done so far, determine how a redesigned and upgraded site can best represent you and your work;

·        summarize this by developing a short written statement that precisely defines the message, experience, or story the site is trying to deliver; This is an important element as it will allow us to evaluate your design in accordance to your intentions. Be as precise as you can in terms of what you expect the users/audience to understand from the site. For instance, even if you decide to work within an information-based design, there are still likely some elements that you will include so that people looking at the work will understand something about you. Do you want people to see your design abilities, creative abilities or simply to understand something about you? In accordance to such intent, what design would be the most appropriate?

·        review your current site and to what degree it meets your goals. Itemize things to improve such as graphics, colour scheme, navigational system and hints, elements that provide context/location information, consistency of visual design, etc.

·        redesign the entire site to deliver this message/story, improve its design features, and to provide a consistent visual design;

·        show off what you can do by redoing work to make it more polished and professional ( NOTE that your original project work must be left in place);

·        add additional features and material as you see fit, such as a resume, experiments in progress, links of interest etc.

Many of you have already started this process, as you have been learning new tools. The objective of this project is to give you a chance to start using the knowledge you have acquired to rebuild a site that you are more satisfied with.

Requirements

Write a short statement that:

1. defines the messages/themes your site  is designed to communicate about you, your work, or anything else and how it will do this – be as specific as possible;
2. describes simply the user experience you are trying to provide. Be brief and specific. Describe how one page leads to the next, the impression you are trying to make as the user goes through your site, why they might continue on to another page, and how the pages, and the way they link from one to another, accomplish this. Consider sketching a quick storyboard to work this out for yourself.
3. reviews the design of your current site including:
1. colour scheme and how it is applied across the site;
2. design elements and how they are applied across the site;
3. consistency of navigational elements and navigational hints;
4. elements that provide context (using text or graphics etc);

and describe in detail how each of these can be improved.

4. describes all the changes you plan to make;

Hand in the laser or inkjet printed statement to your instructors drop box in a sealed envelope with the course name, course section, instructor name, and your name on it. The statement must be submitted by the end of exam week.  Rebuild your Website so that it is ready to be evaluated before the first class of the Winter term.

Project Evaluation

The evaluation of this work will be based on your technical as well as on aesthetic and design abilities.

Technical evaluation:

There are no specific technical or tool requirements for this project expect of course to insure that:

• Your site validates properly
• Your site is compatible with both Internet Explorer 5+ and Netscape 4.77.
• All code and visual material is optimized

Design and aesthetic considerations

You are free to select any type of aesthetic or style (art oriented or more information based). Before you redesign your site, look at what others are doing.

Here are some examples:

• Melinda Rackham
• Proximate
• Magali Desbazeille
• David Carson
• Gerald Bybee

The evaluation of your design and the aesthetic chosen will be done in accordance to the intention you mentioned for the work.