Last year’s docos.

I’ve had a quick look through a few of the documentaries, and the one that seemed most interesting to me was Digital communication and the ‘flash mob’by Scott Markworth. It’s a pretty clean design, not too many colours, nice clear font, and no vertical scrolling, on the front page at least. The links within the pages are a bit confusing, because although they all seem to direct you to another page within the site, they don’t actually tell you that’s where they’re going. It’s only when you look at the labels at the top of each page that you realise where you’ve ended up. Other than that though, I quite like it.

I also didn’t mind Street children by Jerilee Cardoz. It’s a cute idea to link the kids to the petals on the flower, but I think it would have been more useful if there were some labels there too, so you could hover over a face and at least see their name. The site’s not very linear (apart from the home page), and I think I actually would have liked a bit more direction.

Another doco that makes me realise how important clarity and planning is, is Queen Victoria market boys by Surajate Pokmangmee. This one seems to have two home pages, which is a bit unnecessary, but also, while the ’second’ homepage looks pretty cool, it’s really hard to figure out where you’re supposed to be clicking and what you’re going to get.

Without being overly critical (and bearing in mind that next year’s students will have the chance to bag out our work!), I hope that I can come up with something a bit more coherent than most of the documentaries listed on Jenny’s site. Although I haven’t looked at them all, it seems like the key is planning and preparation. Know what you want to do and how you want to do it, so that you have time to fulfill your expectations, or at least come close.  Depending on the state I’m in by the end of semester, I might be happy with just making sure there aren’t any typos!