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.

personal development brief thing

i've decided to do the "design a website which creatively demonstates a typical day in your life" brief as i'm really itching to do lots of web design type stuff again. i've been trying to get my fix in my spare time with my personal site when i can be bothered to sit infront of my screen and not log onto second life, but i'm really wanting to experiment a bit more, and need a bit of incentive.

i want to take this oppurtunity to make myself learn more code, probably something along the lines of XML or a java based script like processing (program used by brendan dawes, from magnetic north and that bloke that did that book "analog in, digital out" which you should go and buy.) i also find his abuse of FTP and PHP (which is in the book but i can't find in on the site) and amazing interactive snow globes interesting. and since it's supposed to be about a day in my life i want to experiment with what kinds of information i can put in to my site through different inputs.

i also want to see how i can possibly combine / make something nice to look at and maybe click from all my different sites / presences. try to possibly make something as ugly as a myspace page into something nice. maybe make records of what i'm doing when on different sites to make pretty things.