Good Food * Good Listening * Good Company
in Northern Bruce Peninsula
519-795-7477 or mail@voyageurstorytelling.ca or return to home page
In which we explain why this web-site
looks and works the way it does
The Zen of Scrolls and Floating Margins
People have said this web site is unusual. Perhaps it is, but then, the world is full of unusual web sites. The medium is astonishingly versatile.
My own preference (this is Paul speaking, since I design and maintain our web site) is to go with the intrinsic properties of the medium to the maximum possible extent, consistent with coherence. The properties of a computer screen that I think are important are:
(1) A fixed left-hand margin, and a floating right-hand margin;
(2) A fixed upper margin, and a floating lower margin, the degree of float being much greater below than on the right-hand.
(3) Easy accommodation of pictures of widely varying sizes;
(4) Considerable capacity for linking, jumping, and putting different pages (they should really be called scrolls) side by side.
This makes the computer screen much different from a book, where all margins are fixed. If Marshall McLuhan is right, that the form in which we receive information strongly influences how we think about it, and by extension, how we think generally, then receiving information from web sites should work against rigid, boundaried thinking, provided that the page is not designed in a rigid form.
Of course, many pages on other sites are built in rigid form, or at least, with insertion of a rigid right-hand margin. There is a tendency in many sites for them to consist of nesting sets of boxes, although I think that tendency is weakening.
So, the short explanation for the design of this web site is that I want my pages to be scrolls in both available dimensions, because I want to encourage people to float the margins of their thinking. And I sprinkle the screen with pictures, because I personally find it difficult to read large blocks of type on the screen.
Such pages are also easy to create, maintain and alter, using HTML, if you have a good editing program, which I do. (I use GoLive.) While I enjoy creating these pages, I don't want them to take more time than need be.
I also like designing logos, lots of different logos, which is probably bad branding, but good fun. The ones used to decorate this page, are, from top to bottom: The Voyageur Storytelling logo; a picture of a toad on a barn-door hook--not a logo, but a cute picture; our Chordelle logo; our Canadian Storytelling Resource logo; our Repertoire logo; our Chautauqua logo, and our Chapbooks logo.
Thanks for taking an interest.
