A worrying slice of my mind

Whilst contemplating the joys of brown paper, and sticking a load of it to my walls, I decided that this special material* needs to be incorporated into my web design project. A quick search revealed a super free resource of brown paper backgrounds, so that's my design base sorted. However the little issue of content is still looming, fortunately I have two ideas.

1. Dissections and dead people: I think dissections are beautiful, and the soulless nature of corpses is an eerie and fascinating reason to explore the boundaries between science and spirituality. I have often pondered how to bring the intrigue of dead people into my art and it's possible that a website is a good medium. The home page could depict a corpse in a morgue with animations of cutting into the body. The items in the morgue would function as links to pages such as the role of the pathologist, dissection equipment through history, and a body parts gallery.

http://www.scienzepostmoderne.org/Immagini/Opere/DamienHirst8AutopsyWithSlicedHumanBrain.jpg
This picture is sadly blood free, so not as nice as it could be, but still quite good.
Check out the patterns on  'second from the right, bottom row', and 'third from the right, middle row'.
Pretty.

Sadly I don't think I can take this idea forward due to a lack of resources. My idea is to show the exceptionally colourful and fluid nature of the internal body when you first open it up, but this luster does not remain for long and I don't think I can get easy access to images that really capture it. Also I am a bit worried about Googling dead people... My alternative is to break into a morgue and take photos myself, this is appealing but probably a touch too illegal to satisfy a Sci comm course component.

2. Science in your kitchen: Food is not science, I say this for my own benefit as I love food and really just want to write about it all the time, but I can't, because food is not science and this website design course is supposed to be about science (communication). Luckily scientific experiments are science and there are a multitude of them that can be done in your kitchen.

This idea lends itself to lots of fun media such as experiment descriptions, photos, and demo videos / explanatory podcasts. It could have functionality for users to post their own pictures and experiences making it more interactive and community based. I'm not sure if it should be aimed at children or adults who would then use the content with children, but either way the crafty nature of home experiments lends itself nicely to the crafty association of brown paper design. Now thats an epic win for a crazy lady like me.

Anyway, enough of my insanity, here's what you've all been waiting for... Stuff I learnt this week:

• Adding links to a webpage. I put links into my test page and also practiced this by adding the links in this blog as embedded links.
• How to put a background image on my test website. This worked nicely although I had some issues with the placement of the div wrapper against the background, adding a higher margin at the top of the background image fixed this.
• Different browsers have different displays. The div wrapper is centre aligned in Firefox but not in Explorer, I'm not sure why but one day I will find out how to fix this.
• CSS gets hard to read once there is a lot of it. My new mentor swears by the use of indentation, she may have method to her madness and next week I will try and find a nice way to format my CSS so it remains legible.

*For those not in the know brown paper is amazing for several reasons: It invokes feelings of nostalgia, sometimes it is ribbed (not just for ladies), great stuff comes wrapped in it (like Victorian parcels, mushrooms, and tramp whiskey), and it compliments twine. It also makes nice patchwork quilts.