Thoughts on my presentation

I've also created my presentation and have practiced it a couple of times getting comfortable with all the slides as well up to this point. A few revisions to bridge the gap between points has been suggested and revised. This is good as the final presentation will be more put together and coherent then if I had given the presentation right off the bat.

There is a lot of information to sum up in a 15 minute span when the project has taken 4 months to complete and seems almost unfair that all this work is compressed into this tight time frame. I know how movie people probably feel now. Working on something for a year with a multimillion dollar budget and having it last 2 hours.. Oh well at least they get to have their projects immortalized on video or dvd available at christmas and at your local rental shop.

I've also scoped out the room on the advice of Tak which was good because I would not have thought stand in the place I did if I had not done this.

Also the damn remote that was installed has the range of a gnat's ass. Thank god I found this out or I wouldn't have been able to address the audience at the same time as giving my presentation. I want to be INFRONT of my audience not behind them giving them the spiel. A valuable lesson. All this stuff is adding up and hopefully I get to practice one or two more times before my presentation on Wednesday morning. 

I've also been watching a lot of presentation zen and ted.com. These website get me amped to present because the subjects that the speakers talk about are things they are experts at and are truly passionate that makes a difference in this world.  Just like charity giving and receiving information creates to improve our lives though knowledge and for this I'm thankful that I have received so much through this class in terms of exposure to things that I didn't know before. I hope I never get so stale and inflexible as to stop learning and think that I know everything there is to know already.

thoughts up to this point

So after a meeting with my mentor Scot a couple of things were pointed out to me.

If the logo was on the lower right hand corner it's the first thing to disappear when someone resizes a window.

The photo credit at the bottom of the polaroid needed to be moved to maintain the humanist feel of the photo.

The panel 'related stories' panel on the side needed to be redone to accommodate the shift in menu from the bottom right where the logo used to be to the top right and the options moved to the top of the left panel which is perfect because most navigation is seen on the left side and might be more intuitive and better seen on that end.

After consulting a few people on the state of the site my friend reminded me that this is not all about death and gloom though that's what people imagine when funding a cause it can also be hopeful causes as well and thus I went back in my file and started to review some of the causes I had come across in my search I came across and project proposal that was carried through by International Center for Sustainable Cities and a few photos I requested. This gave me the content I needed to put the next couple of pages up so it could demonstrate the possibility of networking donors and causes on a smaller scale. The photos were also good because it made some of the organizations more creditable and I understand that if this is a public domain and there's going to be some bad apples that put up faulty or fraudulant stories to get people to donate and scam money but something a rigorous filtering process might be able to minimize like on the 'give meaning' website. This is not within the scope of the project though it will be revisited if the project goes gets support and goes ahead after this the presentations have been given.

The live updates page was also added to show how someone could keep coming back to something like this. It also creates habit.  

The discussions page was also added so that the community can also interact on the site as well. An idea I just had is maybe to put the dialogue as a live update on the main page when filtering through but this might be too much information and excessive rather than necessary. 

Gill Sans regular is also substituted in with the Light version because the regular made it feel a little heavy. Agenda and Bliss were tested as well but did not work as well as the humanist Gill Sans typeface. 

A share button option was also added because of the nature of the stories and photos I think buzz marketing is probably best for a website like this because creditability towards listening to what friends want you to see and what a flyer has to convey does not have the same persuasiveness. Something like a facebook application that could send you stories and photos daily or weekly may increase the exposure of the site as well because people are always uploading the content will never be the same. The more people see these stories the more support they will get. Ultimately this will be a database and hub for people's stories and the beauty of charity and making our world a little easier to live in for everyone.

Transparent menu panels added and starting refinement of positioning of panels and started to consider the links to different pages and more emphasis on user interface.

Big Overhaul of site. Tossed the cardboard but retained the colour of the map and type which was sampled from the cardboard to give the gritty humanist feel to the site. 

Initial vision of the contact sheet. Counter was still made as separate page as part of the splash intro. 

more great ideas gone bad. After talking with Don and Tak splash intro got tossed and the core website and linking the front page to the back seemed more important to throw the audience straight into the website.

Overuse of the cardboard and roughfhouse type pointed out by Maggie Chok and website started to get cleaned up a bit. Still working on links and flow

early 3rd redesign of website

Early iterations of the website. Carboard was inspired by my walk at night.

something very unreal about being afraid to find food because if you do someone else will kill you for it. A dying mother with her two dying children. *sigh.. the world has much to deal with we have to start some where.

 seattle times article here.

re inspiration

coming to a realization that I didn't have 'it' and setting myself back a little longer it has been a hard process but i've come up with an answer and solution to my problem.. while dealing with the 'grad year crisis' .. questions like 'what am i doing' 'what is the purpose of all this' started to come up just making stuff wasn't good enough.. that's when a sleepless night i went for a walk in the biting cold to see molly sleeping in a sitting position on the corner of granville and georgia at 2am.. it was freezing and about to rain yet she was truly 'homeless' not one of those 'i'll get money in the morning and go back to my house in the evening homeless' people. A small tattered cardboard sign at her feet saying 'hungry and broke please help, sincerely molly'. It was a sincere cry for help and I couldn't help but goto subway and buy a meal giving her the cookies and all the change i had in my pocket to give her a reason to live one more day. A little bit of hope. I went home that night and started madly working another concept for my project and came up with 'a reason to live'. Giving is a two way street without her there is no one for me to give to and without me there is no one to receive from. She was my reason to live that night. I hope that she finds a reason to live the morning after. a little hope that we all share and suffer along side each other. I found another site with documentry photography on charitable actions and causes around the world. Have a look . I hope you get something out of this like I did and start to understand why we are so lucky to have enough to give someone a reason to live another day. we do have the power of life and death. we can choose to exercise that. www.ontheground.ca

status update

after the last presentation I realized I had to simplify much of the content as things were getting waaaaaay out of hand as far as complexity goes. In the last couple of frames I started to consider the visual impact the website had instead of having so much text as most other charity sites are based on. So I started with the map again and the causes.

As you mouse over the causes the map would lite up where the places were effected the most

when you click on a cause the map would minimize and a series of auto scrolling panes would move across the screen containing images of the cause

when you click on a picture the pane would expand to screen size to get a full view of the picture and the story would appear on the right. details button would be at the bottom so that you can add to the cause or see the connections that were made from this story

I'm still having issues trying to resolve the problem of showing the extent of the impact of the story I don't feel like the story is enough but I want to show the results of people contributing. I'm not sure if this would be an info graphic or something but it doesn't feel resolved right now and i'm feeling a little unsettled if anyone has any ideas that would be great.

I'm planning on working probably around 10 key wire frames to skin for the final project. Colours are still to be determined at this point but the blue scheme with more contrast is what I think I'll want to go after. 

I've also changed my typeface to be a little friendlier and not so gimicky.. so century gothic right now.. i'm not sure what is 'default' on most web browsers i'll have to take a look into it a little bit more. more work still to come. oh my only a couple of weeks left.

the blog doesn't seem to let me upload too many more photos. i'll have to try again tomorrow.