User:Lucia Dossin/Reading Writing Research Methodologies/Assignment 1

Project 1

First version

Chronica was created and implemented in 2002 by me and Andre Bernardi – two amateur-photographers by then – and it is no longer online. It was a web-photo-log which displayed a calendar, three notes on the project and several pairs of photos. By choosing a date on the calendar, the visitor would load the corresponding pair of pictures. The pictures would be placed on top of each other, with a slider below them to change the top picture's opacity. Below the pictures, portraits of me and Andre would function as links to respectively open up our notes on the project.

Final version: What

Chronica was an online project: a photography diary shared by two amateur photographers, me being one of them. The photographers were living in two different cities: Sao Paulo and Paris. Everyday each one of us took one photo and uploaded to the website. The pairs of photos would be displayed when the user clicked on the corresponding date in a calendar. The photos were placed on top of each other and a slider would allow the user to change the opacity of the picture on top, revealing the picture on the bottom.

How

This website was made using Adobe Flash (still Macromedia Flash, at that time). There was no Content Management system – the images were manually uploaded to the server. The photos I took were taken with an old amateur digital camera.

Why

The idea underneath this project was simple, actually: to share a photographic diary which would show us fragments of our daily activities. The two photographers were the intended 'audience' for this project, ultimately. Choosing what to look at, what to photograph, which picture to upload as 'the photo of the day' was an exercise on reflection. The result, which was the combination of the two photos, was not so important. Sometimes the 'result' was 'meaningful', but sometimes not.

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Project 2

First version

Photographer Marcelo Krasilcic's online portfolio was designed and built in 2012. It consists of a home page, several galleries, a video index page, a link to his blog, a page containing his bio, another one containing contact information and the favorites page.

The home page displays a randomly selected picture. The galleries display a selection of pictures which can be enlarged and selected as 'favorite'. All pictures marked as favorite in a session are displayed in the Favorites page, where visitor can change their order or exclude images individually and send a link containing the favorites' gallery to someone via email.

Final version: What

Photographer Marcelo Krasilcic's website has a basic portfolio structure: a home page – which displays a randomly selected picture, some image gallery pages, a video gallery, a link to his blog, his biography, contact information and the favorites page, which is the website's peculiarity. Each photo gallery page shows a selection of pictures, which can be enlarged by clicking and can also be selected as 'favorite', when the user clicks on the button that says so. All pictures marked as favorite in a session are displayed in the Favorites page, where the user can edit and share their selection via email.

How

The website runs in Wordpress using a custom template. The favorites data is stored in a session and saved as a post.

Why

The Favorites feature makes it possible to change the 'official' editing of the photos.

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First version

Fiveblackcats online portfolio displays a selection of websites which can be filtered by the industry they belong to or by their online status and can also be sorted chronologically, alphabetically or chromatically. Both the date and the name are objectively assigned to each project, but the color is a rather subjective choice. Each website contains its own page, where there is a brief text and a video about it, along with the tags that identify the project (which are the ones used to filter content in the index) and a link to the real website if its status is online.

Final version: What

Fiveblackcats is a webdevelopment 'company' and its online porftolio shows around 30 websites, made by them, which can be filtered (by the industry they belong to or by their online status) and sorted (chronologically, alphabetically or chromatically). The attributes used for filtering and sorting (industry, status, date, name and color) are treated as tags. Each one of these websites can be identified in this index by its name, a thumbnail and a color. By clicking on the thumbnail, the user is taken to a page that contains detailed information about the website and a link to it when it's online.

How

To perform the color sorting I reduced the colors to their hue. A JQuery plugin is being used to take care of the sorting and filtering. This plugin has been combined with another one to manage the hash history (to make it possible for the user to go back in the browser history including the filtering/sorting choices).

Why

Compared to the previous version of this website, I wanted to give the user more meta information on the data being displayed – if he or she was interested in knowing if the portfolio had more online or offline projects, for example, that should be possible and easy. But besides using objective data, such as date, status and name, I also wanted to use something more 'subjective' or apparently non-functional as a sorting parameter – color.