My photoshop assignment can be found here:
Paper Assignment #1
For this assignment I were supposed to do a semiotic analysis of a political website, either of a political party or an individual politician. I ended up with analysing the website and blog of Torbjørn Røe Isaksen, political wonderboy from the conservative party (Høyre).
Isaksen uses his blog to discuss topics of importance, communicate with his electorate and to build his image as an intellectual conservative politician. He might also use his blog to position himself politically and organisationally in the conservative party, but as I don’t know the inner workings of the party I can’t tell if he actually do so.
Through use of multiple modes the website establishes a discourse concerning the ideology of Isaksen and the conservative party, and concerning Isaksens persona. I will look at some/each of these modes in this analysis and hopefully show how these different modes together articulates the before mentioned discourses.
Lets first look at the use of colour on the website. Kress and Leeuwen (2001) states that “[...] for colour to be fully a mode, it has to be a resource for making signs; that is, it has to be the signifier-material which can be used to carry the signifieds of sign-makers” (p 58). Further that “the choice of colours occurs within already established [...] discourses. [...] Colour offers a specific sensory appeal [...] the meanings deriving from specific cultural provenances and physiological/experiential/enotional effects” (p 58). In the case of Isaksens website the already established discourses revolve around politics and ideology. All links on the website are in a light blue, except the article headings, which are black, but turn to blue on hover. The header image is a picture of Isaksen, which I will discuss further later in this text, and mostly contains the colour black. Other than these two colours the rest of the site is black text on a white background. The colour blue is in this context, norwegian politics, connected to both the conservative party and conservative, right-wing politics. In Norwegian political discourse “mørkeblå høyrepolitikk” (dark blue righ-wing politics) has been used as a political talking point against the right-wing, The progress party especially, but also against the conservative party. The use of a light blue might provoke less of a negative feelings in some visitors. It is the context that gives these, or rather this colour meaning, in the context it works as a signifier for the ideology.
Now consider the header image. It consists of on the right side a picture of Isaksen staring upwards, focusing on something outside of the frame, with an inspired look on his face. The middle is mostly black background with a strong light source, and to the left theres a matrix wave which kind of looks like the conservative partys logo. Theres also two short lines of text. The first, which is done in an old fashioned font says “Stortingsrepresentant”, and the second which is done in a more modern and clean sans-serif font says “Torbjørn Røe Isaksen”. The picture of Isaksen is clearly meant to frame him as a stable, up and coming politician. His looks, combined with the black background and the strong light source might suggest that he’s a forthcoming statesman, the picture in some way reminds me of some of the pictures of President Obama from town hall meetings where he looks out over the crowd with a spotlight behind him. The use of fonts in the header is interesting. The font used on “Stortingsrepresentant” is an old fashioned serif font, which signifies tradition and the state. The font used on Isaksens name is a modern sans-serif font, which signifies youth, modernity and it’s clean so it’s a bit conservative. Together the choice of fonts tells a story of the young political prodigy that’s currently represented in parliament.
Over the header image there’s some hyperlinks to other sections of the site. There’s links to a section about Isaksen (Om meg), a section about Telemark, Isaksens home county, a link to a section about books Isaksen have written and contributed to (Bøker og bokbidrag), a section about conservatism and a link to the archive. Some of these links can be interpreted as semiotic symbols. They portray aspects of Isaksens personality, or more precise aspects of hoe Isaksen would like to be seen. The link named Telemark, which leads to a section where Isaksen writes about how he represents not only his party but also the inhabitants in Telemark and policy he’s been working on in that regard, symbolises roots, locality and loyalty to his electorate. The link named “Bøker og bokbidrag”, which leads to a section where Isaksen writes about books he has written and contributed to, symbolises intellectuality, productivity and in some way that ideology is important to him. The link named Konservatisme, which leads to a section about conservatism, symbolises Isaksens ideology, conservatism and that ideology is important to him. He’s not just another politician, he’s a politician with a strong and clear ideology. The links to other blogs and websites in the blogrol in the right menu bar can also be interpreted this way. Here Isaksen links to institutions and people he would like to be associated with, like for example Kongehuset which clearly is supposed to symbolise monarchism, loyalty and patriotism. Other links that pops out is the one to Online Library of Liberty which symbolises intellectualism, book reading and a connection to american values of freedom and liberty, and the links to Minerva and Modern Age, two conservative magazines, one of which in Isaksen is an editor symbolises much of the same, intellectualism and conservatism. There’s also a link to Høyre and Telemark Høyre and some persons Isaksen would like to be associated with.
The general layout of the site is simple. There’s a small and simple menu on the top, a simple header image, and three columns. The left column has a short biography and a short list of categories. The right column has a blogroll with links to other blogs and websites, and a list of social media sites Isaksen is represented at. The colours are few, a light blue for links, white background and black text, except for the biography which is in a grey tone. This design communicates tidiness and certainty, there isn’t much going on here except for the actual content, just like Isaksen would like us to see him. A politician with a clean slate.
Now, the content is the biggest part of the site. For the most part the content is relatively long articles, mostly in only one mode, textual language. On the front page there is only one multimodal article, which other than text contains a video of an even younger political prodigy. This lack of multimodality might build up under the image of Isaksen as a conservative. So if one sees the website as one multimodal text, the lack of multimodality in the individual articles actually works as a signifier for the discourse concerning Isaksens ideology and politics.
Filed under Assignments
Guide to Bergen #2
In this assignment I was supposed to organise links to all Guide to Bergen #1 on a website. I wanted to have all the links on one page, I solved that by organising all the links in categories in a grid layout. I think this way of organising a link collection gives a good overview of the kinds of links and easy access without having to navigate to another page.
If I had better time I would probably have used another font on paragraph text and another colour on the links to differentiate them better from paragraph text.
Filed under Assignments
What happens when you navigate to an URL?
That’s the question Microsofts Igor Ostrovsky answers in this educational article.
Filed under Uncategorized
Blog Assignment #2
In this assignment I’m supposed to analyse a website that I think fails to communicate in some essential way. The website I will analyse is craigslist.com. Craigslist is a online classified advertisement directory with lots of local and global communities and bulletin boards, founded by Craig Newmark in 1995 as a email list among friends before it became a website in 1996. The fundamental design of the website have only undergone minuscular changes since the inception. While Craigslist clearly is a popular classified advertisement directory, it has some fundamental flaws.
Before we go on, let’s see what Craigslist (more specific the Oslo version of the site) looks like:
As we can see the frontpage is loaded with hyperlinks, and the overall design is pretty primitive. This serves two purposes. First and foremost it makes the website instantly recognisable. Anyone who’s ever used Craigslist for some time will recognise the site, as such the primitiveness of the site is Craigslists trademark. Secondly, and this correlates with the first reason, it works. It’s a simple newspaper metaphor just like the classified advertisment pages of any newspaper. It has columns with categories which you can dig down in, pretty much like in a newspaper, without the hyperlinks off course.
Newmarks philosophy is that People are good and trustworthy and generally just concerned with getting through the day. From that statement he concludes that all you have to do to serve them well is to offer a minimal infrastructure to communicate and sort out their business. And there you have Craigslist.
Craiglists simple and primitive design suggests clearly what kind of site it is, a directory. You don’t even have too look at the listings to understand that it is a directory of classified advertisements and community listings, the resemblance to similar newspaper services makes this obvious. This is what makes the site works, it’s simple and understandable for anyone. All would have been good and dandy if it wasn’t for the sheer size of Craigslist. The Oslo directory has 9 categories, each with between 9 and 50 subcategories, all listed on the frontpage without much consideration of how it all lays out, which makes it time consuming to seek out your wanted category. Some of the categories can also be confusing, like what is the difference between communities and discussion forums, should I look after a job under Jobs or Gigs?
Although the problems with information architecture and the primitive design are big, the fundamental functions of Craigslist works. A much bigger problem is spam, both posted spam on Craiglist and spam messages to posters. Craiglist has a small staff consisting of around 30 people, a very flat structure and no computer science department that can develop spam preventing technologies, resulting in an endless stream of spam. This sends a very negative signal. If a significant proportion of messages on Craigslist is spam, the site will seem abandoned, if you as a poster only receive spam messages on your post you might go to another service next time you would like to sell something or seek human contact.
Suggestions on how to fix Craigslist
Craigslists primitive design and huge success has made many people scratch their heads. Many have tried to persuade Newmark to redesign the site, but he resists. Since 2001 the site has been more or less unchanged. To change the site we have to identify what makes the site popular. As discussed earlier in this post, that is:
- It’s simple.
- The newspaper metaphor works.
- It’s local.
It’s clear that people like the Craigslist of today, to make it better without offending existing users the fundamental structure and design must be more or less intact. That means what we have to work with is very limited, but we can do some adjustments concerning typography, layout and colors. By aligning categories in a grid and making top-level categories white on black and in a bigger font we would make it easier to look through them. Links to regional sites now takes up a lot of screen real estate, by removing these links and bury them in a drop-down menu next to the Craiglist header, we would free up a lot of space, making it possible to use a bigger font on sub-categories. We could also move some links in the left sidebar up next to the craiglist logo, especially post to classifieds and my account, making them more accessible and prominent. Another possibility is to focus more on search, which is one of the most used features (one of the few features) on Craigslist. Make the searchfield bigger and place it right under the header. And since we pretty much have emptied the right sidebar, we move those elements that is left, such as the calendar, links to the craiglist blog and certain craiglist-lists such as the “best of craiglist”. These small changes will tighten up the “feel” of Craigslist, make it prettier less ugly and hopefully easier to use, while still maintaining the original newspaper metaphor.
Filed under Assignments
My HTML and CSS experiments
My experiments with HTML and CSS can be seen here.
Don’t read to much into the wall of text I have there, it’s not important, just some thoughts that fell into my head.
Filed under Assignments
