Maybe not...

This week I thought I went to ask advise from another professor, Heather Shaw, who specializes in motion design and interface design. She had a lot of good advice and suggested that I get away from the clean web-site layout that I had and push the project toward something more experimental. A few weeks ago my degree project professor, Ziddi was also suggesting this, but I couldn't picture presenting just an experimental interface as my final project, I felt that I needed something finished, and polished.

Heather showed me a few projects that students at the Dynamic Media Institute at MassART had done as graduate students. They were all experimental and I was blown away by how cool they were. She suggested that I make the time-line the hero of the project, in my website design the time-line became just a graphic when all of the information around it took precedent.

Now I am thinking of having different points in time that contain certain kinds of information behave in different ways through movement. The information will now float on top of the time-line, you will be able to select multiple years and have multiple info boxes so that you can compare years. The info boxes will also be interactive—you will be able to drag them around the screen, and push them back in space, if you want to keep them open for further comparisons, to allow room for more to be opened!

I'm also thinking of making a book highlighting a block of time that will behave similarly to the dynamic time-line. Perhaps it will be printed on a thick stack of translucent paper so I can really show the depth of the time-line/tunnel?

I'm excited, it's gonna be a lot of work to pull this off, but totally worth it. 4 weeks to go, including this weekend...