Narrative
DM2280B spring 2014 · Corcoran School of Art + Design
Instructor: David Ramos (alberto_ramos@corcoran.edu)
Build a website that tells users a story. Consider navigation, user experience, typography, image choice, and the value of templates and shared stylesheets in web development. Think of this website as a single system, built from many smaller and reusable parts.
Most of all, consider the way in which a reader should experience the site. The heart of your task is to convey a narrative: deciding what story you want to tell, creating a site design that communicates that story, and building that site.
This project involves the design of system of parts; all of these pieces should work as a whole. For this project, use every page of the site to express a single design concept. The site will most likely draw from two or three standard layouts, with only the content changing from page to page. Make every page adhere to one overarching color scheme, one way of handling type, and one grid. Explore ways to make individual pages stand out, but only after you have constructed the fundamental system, and only within the framework that you have constructed.
Objectives
- Create design that tells a story.
- Learn efficient HTML/CSS coding practices.
- Build a website that is based on a controlled number of standard templates.
- Work with a larger amount of content.
- Experiment with a design process for a more complex, concept- and content-based website.
Deliverables
One website, built in HTML/CSS. The website should have at least three page types/page templates; creating more than five page templates is probably unnecessary and inadvisable. (We can discuss requirements for projects that do not fit a page-by-page model.)
At the end of the project, turn in a rough, un-designed PDF process book, containing images of your work in progress, sketches, and early versions.
You may use JavaScript to add features to the site, but remember that JavaScript is not the focus of this course. Consider using existing scripts based on the jQuery library.
Evaluation
20% Concept and storytelling
20% Page layout and typography
10% Usability of site structure and navigation
10% Use of templates and standardized code
20% HTML/CSS/JavaScript quality and correctness
20% Process and process documentation