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Lester Beall CD-ROM Prototype

Assignment: Create a dynamic, interactive learning and teaching tool for students of design history. Using content from Roger Remington's book on Lester Beall, the project was a prototype for the first in the World of Graphic Design series.

Intro screen

Main Menu

The New York years with the scrolling timeline

Example of a quote with work

Approach: The Design Interactive team decided on a subset of content and set out to show examples of what was intended in the full concept. The World of Graphic Design Series was intended to be a multimedia rich teaching suite that included slides of a designer's work for the teaching faculty and an accompanying CD for students that included design history information, work examples of the different designers, applications that allowed students to pull together their own slide shows and presentations from the materials included on the CD, video clips, timelines of work in historical context and other materials. We used Macromedia Director to create the prototype.

Using Lester Beall as an example, the team decided to show samples of several of the sections. The work of the designer was divided up into 3 key time periods. This division was used as the main menu and led the user into different information about the designer. Quotes by the designer, information about contemporaries, images of the work and personal information about the designer were available from every screen.

We decided that this information and the toolset of mini applications would be accessible from every screen and we developed a very small menu bar at the bottom of each screen. Since the applications in the toolset were very different than the Quotes or Contemporaries, these buttons were visually separated and gathered together into one larger button.

The design student could explore the information in several different ways: via the main three divisions off the main menu, in a linear fashion starting at the beginning of Beall's career using the back and forward arrows in the large toolset button or by randomly clicking into areas and following hypertext links that were contextually places, i.e. a quote might lead to a piece of work which might lead into the timeline which might lead to information about a contemporary.

I developed an underlying grid system for the prototype and then worked out low fidelity page mockups, defining major and minor content areas for each section type. I worked on the visual look, the information architecture and the iconography for the main toolset as well. I also worked on the actual Director prototype, coding most of the piece and working with a programmer for the more complex sections like the scrolling timeline.

Outcome: The prototype was used with a suite of other materials to shop the series around to different publishers in the design history and education space. At one point we had a publisher for the series, but the world of CDROM collapsed and the project never moved forward.