Photojournalism: American Diversity Project
The 2007 American Diversity Project is set in Clarksdale, Mississippi. It’s a photojournalism package with audio, multimedia, and traditional (silent) photo stories that documents a place.
The photo work is excellent, well worth a look.
The Flash package has some very good points and a few unfortunate bits.
Good points: Single-screen interface, no pop-up windows, no scrolling. Easy to use, consistent. The interface does not interfere with the stories or your experience of viewing, listening and reading. SEPARATE HTML PAGES: This is AWESOME. It means you can bookmark, for example, Stories or Multimedia or Photographers. Each segment has its own unique URL. Too cool!
Unfortunate bits: The package design is too tall for 1024 x 768 (but the width is perfect). It is only just barely too tall — but the menu and navigation for almost everything in the package is at the BOTTOM. This became increasingly frustrating for me the longer I spent in the package. The tiny overflow in height would not have been a real problem except that I had to scroll to navigate on every single segment.
The maximum dimensions my screen can accommodate at 1024 x 768: 1005 pixels in width, 588 pixels in height. According to recent stats at Browser News, about 81 percent of today’s Web page accesses show a monitor resolution of 1024 x 768. PLEASE convey this information to your designers and multimedia producers!
The text has that slightly blurry problem that Flash text is prone to if you don’t make the proper choices while authoring in Flash. In other words, you don’t need to settle for fuzzy fonts in Flash! But you have to know what to do to ensure that the text is sharp and clear.
For me, the site menu had too many items on it. I would rather have seen section pages that clustered the photo work, the “about” materials, and the backgrounders.
Also, what about a map, folks? Where is Clarksdale, Mississippi?
Technorati tags: Flash | Flash journalism | multimedia | photojournalism | online journalism | online media | design | usability | examples
Thanks for all the feedback Mindy.<br/><br/>Just to clarify,<br/>the site isn’t finished yet.<br/><br/>We had every intention of it being finished by now but we ran into some major roadblocks throughout the week.<br/><br/>I’m so behind I’m still trying to get all the captions into the multimeida sections.<br/><br/>We were working on very limited resources so a site of this magnitude with all the separate direct URLs is a tremendous amount of work for so few people on staff and so little time.<br/><br/>It should be finished within another week or so.<br/><br/>Thanks!
May 22, 2007 at 6:33 pmCool! I hope you don’t mind my complaining. The separate URLs are really great! Well worth the extra trouble!
May 22, 2007 at 10:02 pm