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Assignment 4: Final

Week 4

For next class (December 7):

• Design: Take today’s feedback and use it to refine your design. Consider feedback on the site’s flow, usability, and visual strategy.
• Development: Your API call should be returning and placing content into your site. Spend the next week refining your design and, if you haven’t already, introducing responsive CSS values and @media queries.

Week 3

For next class (November 30):

• Continue developing your project’s design. Complete a browser-based (built with HTML/CSS/Javascript) prototype of your site so that we can begin to iterate on the UI over the final few classes after break.
• If you don’t already, you should have your API call returning and outputting the data you need. If it’s easier, feel free to separate this task from your browser-based prototype.

Week 2

For next week (November 16):

• Based on today’s feedback, select a design direction and refine it. If you haven’t already, begin to test out your chosen API. Try completing an API call and logging the output you need for your project.

Week 1

For next week (November 9):

• Read Publics and Counterpublics by Michael Warner
• Use the boilerplate API to finish the example started in class
• prepare at least three separate design directions with consideration for which API and secondary content you want to use for each direction (you can have multiple directions with the same API). If you have time, begin to test out an API from one of your directions.

Brief

This assignment is meant to expand students’ proficiency in navigating Javascript APIs, and provoke a critical understanding for how dynamic content is handled and presented on the web.

For this assignment you will be making an interactive and living (dynamic) website with at least one API and some sort of complementary content (this secondary content can be static or pulled from another API). You may use any of the APIs we went over in class or one from your own research. Think carefully about how you contextualize and combine your content and what kind of interactions you supply the end-user with.

Requirements

• Uses at least one API
• Contains at least two content types (at least one API content type and one static content type)
• Is responsive (works on desktop and mobile)
• Changes over time

Questions

• How might the presentation of your selected content influence how users understand your content?
• What message might you draw out from the pairing of your two content types?
• How does the website react to the API over time? (is it just the content that changes, or does the way the site looks (color, scale, position, legibility, etc) change as well?)
• What is the type of content you pull from the API and how might you abstract it?
• What do the type of user interactions imply about how you view the content you are presenting?