Last night I decided to try to recast a webpage that someone had created in Flash into html/css. Now, if those terms mean nothing to you, don’t worry. Just know that it was a decontruction/reconstruction exercise. A brain stretch to look beyond the final appearance and discover different ways to divide the pieces and put them back using a different set of rules… only the goal is to have the end result to appear the same. Smoke and mirrors. A phone that looks like a rotary dial, but is in reality a touch tone.
The point being that I stretched my brain to look beyond the images on the page and re-evaluate how I saw them. I had to take a function that is most easily represented by plain, squared-off rectangles and make it pretty. Or, was it that I took something really pretty and complex and broke it into little functional boxes? In the end, I see it quite differently than I did before. I hope that when someone else sees it, that they will not see it differently. The viewer just needs to know that it works well.
In the end, I’m not totally sure that the way I went about the project is going to be an effective solution. But, the process was worthwhile. To borrow from the original author of the thing I was working on:
Brain stretching is never wasted– sometimes you end up applying what you learned to something totally different from what you thought you were working on!
Now, back to the journey (which, it seems is more important than reaching the final destination.)