live brief evaluation (or i'll be glad when this is over)

The main thing that I think of when I think of this brief is having far too many ideas and things to learn and nowhere near enough time to carry it all out. I really wanted to try to stretch the brief as far as I could, to really take my web skills further and see what else I could do instead of just a nice layout and working links.

My first ideas were very much wanting to show the mix of the real and virtual in my life, and not really concentrating on the everyday boring routines but looking at the traces left by my scurrying around the place and the weird things in my head, which naturally affect my perception of the outside world. I was also interested in the idea of leaving traces on web pages, which found it's way out in my new addiction to twitter, which I started using as a tool to track my thoughts about just about anything and also my ideas and research for the project.

I also started using myspace and facebook more as it was suddenly classifiable as work since it was an example of “web 2.0”, although I didn’t end up using them in my project at all.

The final product is something like my original idea but not. It’s a lot simpler than I had originally planned, my original idea was to have lots of random pages and having them all interlinked, almost a representation of my mind or memory. The final product is still pretty random, I tried to keep the text to a minimum apart from the pop ups, I wasn’t about to explain myself or anything on there, I wanted it to be confusing.
Some of my ideas such as the singing kokeshi and myspace feeds had to be abandoned as I was running out of time and it was making everything far too complex. I had to simplify my ideas into something I could actually make instead of something that I couldn’t get to work.


I think in the second year of this course I will definitely be doing interactive design, as much as I like motion graphics and am starting to like video I’m starting to become obsessed with the possibilities of interactive design. After looking into the twitter API and getting an idea of how web 2.0 works and how different sites can be mashed up together and used as well as looking into the work of Brendan Dawes and John Maeda which focuses on the more experimental uses of digital media. At the start of the year I was still interested in web design but wanting to see if I would be good at anything else, and after messing around in other areas for a bit I’ve found that I’m more obsessed with web design than ever, as everything else I’ve enjoyed this year can easily be brought into web design, which is something I tried to do by using video and second life in my website as well.