This assignment asked us to take an excerpt from Ellen Lupton's Thinking With Type and manipulate it in both space and time, applying one or more multimedia paradigms. The idea for my design came from my own experience with the text. The first time I took a glance at it, I read the opening paragraph and stopped. Like the text itself suggests, I was in a sort of “search mode” and the density of the text turned me away. When I returned later, though, I realized it was a section of the text that had a lot of nice provocative phrases like “the medium is not always the message.” My design pulls those provocative phrases to the front to act as a sort of table of contents for the phrases. It also reduces the initial presentation to a single line per paragraph hopefully making it a little more inviting for the reader to poke around.
As far as problems go, there are many. The usability isn't great; paragraphs that overlap their neighboring index entries could be a little confusing. Flash does poor with type rendering in general, but it seems to be especially bad for Garamond, which is what my paragraphs and index items are set in. Also, the initial screen looks a little dull to me.