Capstone Project

Using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, create an interactive, multi-screen project for the Web which makes an argument or performs an analysis using images, informational graphics, and words.

This is a "capstone" project because it is an opportunity for you to build on and combine what you learned in at least two of the earlier projects. For instance,

• imagine creating a "Confection" that allows the viewer to click open different portions of the image to see pop-up windows with information graphics like the ones we did for the "Visualized Data" project. Or
• imagine a "Confection" Project composed as a multi-screen environment through which the viewer navigated as if it were a "Graphic Narrative," visually experiencing both analytical information and emotional "camera work."

The subject matter is open, but the scale and ambition of the project should merit the level of development such a project affords.

The power of earlier projects like the Visualized Data or Confection Projects lay in how they brought lots of information into a single eyespan. A key challenge of this project, on the other hand, is to find ways of using the mutli-screen interactive format (like the Graphic Narrative) to make the analysis or argument more effective, rather than just breaking up the information and making it harder to see how it all relates together.

The purposes of this project are:

• to give the opportunity to combine the techniques and philosophies of at least two of the earlier projects
• to produce a visual-rhetoric project that makes an argument or performs an analysis over a number of "views" or screens, rather than just one
• to experiment with the possibilities of a "diachronic," rather than "synchronic," visual argument.

Resources

• Reearview Mirror Ad
• Periodic Table of Visualization Methods