Ticking over

As you can see I’ve rather neglected this blog the last few weeks. Have been concentrating on sketches and the final images although the time is now to sit back and reflect on what is working and what isn’t….

First off notes on a discussion recently had: DESIGN: I feel I’ve rather neglected this part of the project the biggest issue at this point of the course is narrative. How to successfully create an interactive, immersive and satisfying narrative that…In simple terms “Works”. Although I’m pleased with the images that I’ve already created this is not a graphic novel, comic, book this is supposed to be a different experience combining movement- organic movement ( which was what I originally wanted) progression of design and simple graphical animation. I sometimes feel that I look at this project in a traditional print way I need to find new ways to apply traditional strategies of appreciation. Form, Balance, colour, light, surface, space, iconography, representation these and other components are our customary understanding of art and design. I need to think of these and other elements to create a successful digital piece of design. Not sure if that makes sense but it does in my head. I can see what I want but how to accomplish this is proving most difficult. As was pointed out this is a prototype and all these issues do not have to be resolved right now. I think what I’m finding most difficult is working on the illustrations and then putting it all together with the moving text, various pages, the “organic” navigation system, the zoom and drag function and now I’m writing this the actually design in flash. One such question is when you zoom into the page and then drag yourself around does the navigation system disappear so the user has to zoom out to be able to progress to the next section of narrative? Will this effect immersion? Will people understand this? Should I just not bother with the zoom and drag? (While were on this its very difficult designing in Photoshop and thinking of the grander scheme while doing it. Very difficult indeed. I have been doing tests with the zooming- to which point does the illustration look crap- and therefore how big does the hidden images have to be? (Again I’m not happy with my results) All of these questions should have already been resolved however they haven’t. I’ve reached a point where I don’t know what to do. I’ve decided against drawing the images in flash mainly because I know I can do this- but it takes time, too much time as well as limiting what the piece can look like. For my final project I will have to come back to this issue.

I have come to terms with this project not being that aesthetically pleasing- something which grates to someone who’s main concern in anything and everything (rather shamefully) is the design. I’ve also come to the conclusion that I am not going to be able to complete all strands of the narrative. I’ve chosen two and specifically four illustrations that will use movement and action script. As long as I can give a basic idea of what I want to achieve I feel this is plausible.

Navigation: A stroke of genius came my way one evening whilst hanging up a picture: A gallery. The navigation is a gallery- multiple sized picture frames with sections of the illustration that comes with its specific segment of narrative. As I’ve already mentioned and illustrated the navigation is on a grid like structure you as the participant goes from left to right- the normal order of westerners reading. However I wanted to jazz this up a bit- going back to my first project I thought of mirrors and then came up with the gallery idea. The reason this is good is that I want to the navigation to move and change depending on what page you are on. I wanted the navigation to blend in with the design and look like it was meant to be there, not just plonked to the side or bottom of the page. It is in fact an integral part of the design and I wanted to illustrate this. This gallery will change shape and size depending on which page you are at. The image or frame that you choose will “grow” and take up much of the page, the remainder space will have the rest of the navigation, other illsutations and some of the text. This does present problems though- as the frames will be all different sizes and shapes from experimentation it’s sometimes difficult to see which the next frame is, that you’re supposed to look at. Have thought about blending out the images that you can’t look at, but this feels like too many constraints for the viewer. Although I am in charge of the narrative, I’m in control, through constraints I’ve manage to make this text resemble something of a narrative, but I didn’t want to have to spell it out quite so blatantly to the viewer. I think at this late stage I’ve just got to decide something and go with it; however this will be my first question asked when I start my final project. Even as I write this is a few more problems has presented themselves as well as a few answered. My original idea was to have the navigation system the design of the page but I seemed to have lost this idea through the process and it has answered a few of the problems stated here. I don’t need to design the illustrations with the text. This is separate- in a frame…. The text will mostly be outside of the frame. More on this later I will go and see if this helps!