Project 2: Verbal as Visual

Using Photoshop and Dreamweaver, take the content of an "old media," verbal text and create a series of hypertext screens that realize the original's effects by "visualizing" its verbal elements (letters, words, passages) using font, size, color, placement, backgrounds, layering, etc.

Take a look at this interpretation/remediation of the film Seven done by Erik Yanda, a student in a previous class.

The original text that you choose to work with can be either your own work or someone else's, but it should be an aesthetic or "literary" text, rather than something analytical or journalistic. (An alternative possibility: take a non-aesthetic text and make it aesthetic: take a news report of the Columbia disaster and make it a kind of verbal/visual poem in the tradition of "found poetry.")

The main points of this assignment are

• to recreate and/or interpret the meaning and effect of the original text in the non-linear, visual/verbal discourse of digial hypertext
• to find a set of design elements (font, color, placement, negative space, layering) to "visualize" the language, to make their appearance on the screen matter to the effect
• to select, disperse and perhaps sequence chunks of the original text, mingling in new language that you feel are necessary for your effect or interpretation
• to combine verbal grammar and visual design into a new hybrid "voice"
• to create a hypertext that still achieves its effects primarily with verbal, rather than an album of pictures with some captions
• to unify the look and feel of the various pages with the consisitency of choices of font, color, background, layout, etc.
• to use Photoshop and Dreamweaver together to create these pages