Click here to view our Final Project (Shirley Liu & Matt Fertig)
A quick view of our project:
Background:
From the start, Matt and I had trouble trying to figure our topic for the final project. We thought about creating a madlib type fill in the blank with flip books. I was interested in doing something that focused on the Chinese Zodiac and we eventually decided to do something different from the traditional Chinese Zodiac informational page. Our final project was a composition of both of our ideas; we created a flip book stories for every zodiac. We went out and found people that represented every animal on the zodiac and asked them a question. Our project’s focus is to display what each person described as one thing that makes them happy. Along with the audio recording, we made flip books that displayed their story with the interviewees as the zodiac character in the book.
Process:
Matt mainly handled the interview process and the making of the flip books, while I focused mostly on the coding and drawings of the zodiac icons. I had a little bit of trouble figuring out the layout of our website because of the many ideas I had. I thought about displaying the signs in a square or circle and then also having information boxes that give further information on the zodiac. However, I realized that the main focus of our project was to tell people’s stories and not to completely inform people of the traits and compatibility between zodiac signs. I had some trouble figuring out how to get all the images of the signs to change when the user hovered over. Eventually, I was able to figure that out which made the overall process smoother. I believe we split up the workload fairly and in the end we were able to create a project that we were proud of. As we wanted to create a website that was more than just an informational page, we decided to design the layout of our website to reflect that. We believe creating a minimalistic, black and white background allows for the viewer to focus on the colorful stories of each individual we interviewed.
Conclusion:
I really enjoyed working on this final project with Matt and I loved listening to the stories from everyone that we interviewed. I believe we achieved our goal of wanting to create a website that presented the Chinese zodiac in a new way. It would be cool in the future if we were able to collect more stories from around the world and if we added an element where the user is able to tell their own story and add a flip book. Overall, it was a pleasure making this website as we were able to achieve something that started out as a drawing in my journal.