No, I'm not going to tell you a story. Instead, I want to try and write down some of my thoughts about effective storytelling in various mediums. Each piece is going to be based around a particularly effective (or ineffective) example I've seen recently.

Generally, I'll try to write in a spoiler-free fashion, as far as plot points are concerned. Obviously, by talking about style and presentation, some of the mystery will be revealed, but hopefully only enough to pique your interest if you aren't familiar with the work in question.

First up, my impressions of the storytelling in Heroes...

(Read more...)

Topics: art/design, entertainment/storytelling

[#]

(I should be finishing off a prototype for a client meeting tomorrow. So naturally, I'm browsing the web and thinking about other stuff instead.)

Dave Shea has rolled out a redesign for his Mezzoblue website. Naturally, being a blog, there is a post about the changes and choices. I am not a designer, but I like reading about how other people work and I know what I like to look at, so Dave's thoughts make interesting reading (he was the guy who started CSS Zen Garden for those recently returned from a three year stay on Mars).

One of the interesting ideas on the site is hist idea of grouping posts into collections for archival purposes. Go read the above post for details and links, but there is some interesting thinking going on at the moment about how to present archives outside of just a list of dates. I particularly liked his idea of tying the colour scheme for each page in a collection to the photo at the top.

Dave attributes this idea to (amongst others), the Absenter photo journal. Go and have a look at this site. Click "back" a few times and notice how well the navigation colours match the image. Beautiful. I deeply wish I had the skills to create something like that, instead of just being able to be amazed by the result. Not all of the photographs appeal to me, but the ability to take a shot with mostly a single standout colour time and again is pretty impressive, too.

Topics: art/design, photography, technology/web

[#]