Rationale

This is my rationale for my online gallery, Graffiti Canberra. Graffiti Canberra can be found online at  www.graffiticanberra.com.My site is designed as a gallery of local graffiti, as well as a source of information for graffiti artist locally and wider.

I designed my page from the ground up. I started at a simple

"hello world"

And worked my way up to what I consider quite a complex page. The page is made up mostly of images and links. I had to create a template page, which consists of the background image, the image repeat to the right, the header image, the links to the left  and the tags containing these elements. After only completing the html for one page I pretty much built up my CSS style-sheet till the page looked how I wanted it to, and then continued doing html for the other 17 pages. I had to make the decision to use photography as the best way to show graffiti, since it is a visual form, however I also wanted to show people where these image where found, and this affected page layout and also created a need for some form of mapping system. A lot of the images on the page were not photographed by me, but the people who had were willing for me to use them.

Organisation of the page became simple when I decided to use a geographical sorting. The “locations” page became the main browser for images within the site, and from there users would pick which location to view. The addition of the exhibition page was a later idea, which gave me the opportunity to show off my favourite works, free from geographic sorting. Flickr became useful here, hosting images for free, however I soon realized that only about half the images i had photographed would fill up the upload quota for the page. As such i turned to other image hosting sources, and tried to use Facebook. In the end I resorted to using multiple Flickr accounts, mainly because of its mapping capabilities and its geoFeed system.

In my site I tried to follow as many global design conventions as I could.  The header goes at the top, links are easy to find and stand out, as well as being underlined. There is no text underlined that isn’t a hyperlink. The text is easy to read. The text is read left to right. I tried to reflect the culture of graffiti in my page design, with a graffiti style header, bright colours on a dark background and a simple, quick layout. I deliberately chose to break one design convention, the colour of the links. I decided the blue was not the correct colour for the page, and instead went with the brightest green possible. This made the links stand out more, without creating too much confusion about whether they were in fact links or not.

The difference with my site from others is the locality of it. There are many websites devoted to graffiti and graffiti photography, but there are very few devoted to these causes within Canberra. From my research I found one other page with graffiti in Canberra – “http://www.home.aone.net.au/~byzantium/aerosol/index.html”. However I found this site far too wordy and hard to use. So my page had to be attractive, usable, not too wordy, with quality pictures, and specific to Canberra.

Hopefully my site turned out useful, attractive and usable. I enjoyed making it.