I thought more about Eckstein this year as that Middle School’s teachers have been posting their classes online. I spent so much time there beyond just the three years I officially attended in grade 6-8. I’ve lost track of how many Summer Music School sessions I participated in. They also let me enter band a year early in fifth grade. I had six months of homeschooling and had no other music option. I forgot how much fondness I had for it. My head moved on in current affairs but my heart stayed back. I noticed the similar K-12 approach returned with my website project by achieving one main large goal over a multi-year time-frame. I didn't even realize the dual website project closely approximated the time put into Jr. High or High School. It looked like disjointed efforts though it wasn't at all. I can't believe it all started to fall into place though no endgame or basic structure had been thought out.
I discovered last year that this way of working, this out-right ignoring the grand scheme of things, is how some others organize a large project as well. This was taken to an extreme in the documentary “Persistence Of Vision” about a groundbreaking animation (“The Thief and the Cobbler”) that took an astonishing 25 years of production. The project largely got scrapped when the financial backers realized no storyboarding was being done. This way of working by writing small intricate parts without thinking about how they would flow together was also how I did this project.
I wasn’t really thinking of connecting so many articles in such a specific order. I am happy this came together in this way. Strange how such a similar approach can yield such different results. In a ways the movie The Thief and the Cobbler did become a success in a weird roundabout way. In the early 90s Disney would steal many parts of this film to what would become their mega-hit Aladdin. Much of this work would ultimately become successful even if it was made by someone else. If the goal is to have success no matter how it is achieved then the non-traditionally costly way of doing it did work. I would prefer to live in a perfect world where those type of decisions didn't need to be made but it is clear that the hard road often is the path to this destination whether or not we may like it. Rarely do these two paths converge.
Of course I am not saying this project will take 25 years! I just mean that it could have been thrown together a lot faster but the exploring of different ways of putting a page together allowed me to consider things like "what if the page on August looked like the "August and Everything After album cover? I also could introduce elements on top of that like make the background gradient shift while the visitor reads it; yellow, orange, tan and gold. A slight alteration that perhaps some won't even notice but could provide some intrigue to the people who do.
There are tools that let me overlap images, one on top of the other, so why not take the time to learn them? I could also set it to a parallax so that the hand drawn type below the foreground move at different speeds as you scroll. Now we are bringing something to the design that you couldn't get from the still album cover! Putting care into every step gives so many more options. That is what makes a job like this so exciting to me!
