Artifacts of Graphic Design Timeline
Role
Designer and Developer
Brief Ask
Develop and design an interactive, educational web experience that uses delightful and unexpected interactions.
Criteria for Success
Deliver a fully functioning website that incorporates at least one custom JavaScript library.
Context
The artifacts graphic designers use have changed tremendously in the past few decades. Many of the digitized tools used today have rooted history in analog tools. However, many of these tools have been forgotten and are no longer taught in graphic design curriculum.
Strategy
Pair an interactive graphic design timeline with a deeper dive into the tools that changed the way we design.
Website
The Artifacts of Graphic Design Timeline a collaborative website built and designed with Anqi Wan. The website is an interactive timeline of advances within the graphic design community and uses a combination of photography, code, and writing.
Interactions
Each interactive illustration depicts a trend in the design world during the respective decade. To build these interactions, I used the parallax javascript library “Skrollr,” which allowed the illustrations to appear to draw themselves as a user scrolls through the website.
Historical Inspiration
For Anqi’s portion of the website, we explored the technology and computation that caused essential shifts in the design industry. We heavily researched tools that aided these shifts, such as Sketchpad, a revolutionary computer visualization tool developed by Ivan Sutherland. A rendering of his famous first demo, “Winking Girl,” appears below as part of our website.
