Spring Cleaning

...of projects that is. For my 20th Century Art History class the final assignments were a choice between writing a paper on modern design and how it takes its influence from previous art movements during the 20th century, and creating a chart that illustrates the flow of movements and how the evolution of artistic principles occurred as a result. I usually always take the write the paper option just because I know that a paper is about 4 hours of work and I generally need to use as much time as I can gather to focus on my core classes and their end of the semester projects.

In this case I chose to make a chart, but only because it gave me the much needed opportunity to practice more with Flash and AS3. The chart as assigned was basically explained as paper, glitter, and whatever other art majors use. I asked him before embarking on my knowledge quest.

Before really settling on the format and design, I revisited a beloved concept for organization: mind maps. I spent a few hours researching on technology to construct an interactive mind map and completely fell in love with the spring graph that I found on Ruben Swieringa's blog. As I explored his source code and the references he provided for his own project, I discovered that I don't have access to Flex Builder 3 at school (or so I thought... but that's another story) and attempted to figure out how to use the Flex SDK provided by Adobe. I don't even know how much time I "wasted" trying to understand using the SDK and the terminal in sync. So, I abandoned that concept and devised a new layout for the information that I was trying to design for.

I was drawing my own mind maps on paper laying out the movement of art and it's concepts, and stumbled upon a fantastic diagram by Alfred H. Barr Jr. Barr was an art historian and the very first director of the MOMA NYC. I used the arrow concept (and some of his placements) to build my interactive chart.

I used the Tweener and Web Devils classes for all of my movements and interactions.

Here are some screen shots: