I'm preparing all of my research, design explorations, as well as a summary of what my project is about to show to the guest critics in class tomorrow. I am planning on presenting them with my idea for the website as well as the direction focusing on just the history, which is more of an information design project. I have been doing a lot of research on "timelines" on the web. From
what I've encountered they have all been rather boring, I have not been able to find any non-linear examples, which I found odd.
I recently read a message board post from Edward Tufte, who is an information designer, known as "the da Vinci of Data". The post was in respone to someone asking him about designing timelines for the web, he had this to say:
"The computer screen is not very good at displaying a big historical timeline; the low typographic resolution of the screen forces viewers to scroll endlessly through century after century (and, even worse, horizontal scrolling). Perhaps, on the computer screen, time should flow vertically, with events described by lines of horizontal type at each date. On the other hand, it is nice to maintain the time-flowing-left-to-right convention used in excellent timelines (printed, lots of overlapping events, hundreds of events)."
The post is from 2002, so perhaps he would have a different opinion today, since there has been a huge amount of progress in web design, particularly with Flash, which can now handle 3D space (z, x, and y axis). I think that this holds the key to showing "timelines" on the web in an engaging way.
Anyways I have been working on the site map and have nixed the experimental side of the site. The experiments will in turn be a part of the site itself. The experiments being 3D motion graphics and images used within the site.
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