Magnum Photo Agency: Access to Life
The Magnum Photo Agency provided content for a photographic and documentary video project about AIDS for The Global Fund. Magnum photographers produced stories on the effects of HIV/AIDS in nine different countries, gathering multimedia and stories from thirty different people before and after they began treatment for AIDS.
The first element of the multimedia presentation on the website is an interactive map of the world highlighting the countries where stories were produced. Each country is a button that when hovered over brings up a thumbnail and brief description of the attached story. Clicking on a country takes the user to another splash page, with a more in-depth summary and a button to play the video story directly in that frame. The country splash pages all provide a graphic link back to the main interactive map so the user can start over freely. This link is also available throughout the playing of the videos. The user has complete control of the videos, with Play/Pause buttons, volume control, a scrubbable timeline with thumbnails, and an option to enter fullscreen mode. All of these controls are intuitive and fit in seamlessly with the presentation. » Continue Reading…
India in Motion: The Washington Post
The Washington Post’s “India in Motion” contains 22 video vignettes between one and two minutes long, showing sights and sounds of different cultural regions around India. The overall design is clean and condensed. The layout and color scheme (warm tones) enhance the presentation. It’s evident that the multimedia framework is an addition to the overall Web site. It fits into the overall design well enough, benefitting from unifying styles and typefaces.
This project works well in Flash because there are so many parts and chapters. Everything is clearly organized into sections, and navigation is simple. You can browse each category or subcategory visually, or use a dropdown menu for direct access to a specific video. Each individual video can be played or paused by the user, but the default action open opening is to autoplay. This is frustrating, especially when just wanting to browse through. I don’t always want audio to play right away. » Continue Reading…
The Web site of photographer Michael Robinson Chavez -- note the lack of any navigation without having to scroll down.
Michael Robinson Chavez currently works for the Los Angeles Times, but I first became familiar with his work several years when he was a staff photographer for The Washington Post. He is probably best known for his international photojournalism and conflict coverage. Chavez was also awarded a POYi Award of Excellence for Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 2008.
His personal website is cleanly designed, with a very simple layout. The homepage contains a brief “news” section, and one image, which changes upon a refresh.
The Web site’s navigation scheme is organized rather unusually, at least for a newspaper photojournalist. It is set up for sections pertaining to geographic locations, rather than by categories describing the types of photos. The Web site is entirely built around stories and location-specific galleries — there are no single, standalone images, and no single “portfolio” section. This is obviously a personal choice, as Chavez has a large body of work from around the world to display, and he clearly wants to portray/market himself as a global documentarian, but I’d still like to be able to glance at a “best of” section. Lastly, other than a (very) brief overview of each story or gallery, there are no captions with any photos. I have a pretty big issue with this, as I’d really like to know what’s going on in some of these photos when it’s not really clear who’s shooting at who or why someone is crying, yelling, or bloodied. For a documentary photojournalist, it just seems kind of lazy to not have any context. » Continue Reading…