Truth or Tale? (Web Design)

Website Design

Professor: Alex Braidwood

urban legends Urban Legend truth tale Website creepy Scary danger story Stories noise

For this student project, we were asked to design a website with a minimum of 5 main pages. To guide our designs, we were given a theme of "noise" and were allowed to interpret it in our own way.

To that end, I decided create a website about urban legends. I connected this to "noise" with the reasoning that urban legends create a kind of cultural noise. When hearing these stories, it is often hard to tell where the truth ends and the tale begins, causing listeners to question their reality. To add to the noise, the site is only a collection of stories - I leave it to the readers to decide whether they are fact or fiction.

I designed the website to have a creepy mood, keeping to only black, blue and white for my color scheme and using inverted photographs for all the images. The sharp corners of the boxes give the impression of danger, and the way the content fades away at the top and bottom of the window as the user scrolls gives the pages a ghostly appearance.

Homepage:

The link turns orange on hover and takes the user to a random urban legend when clicked.

Sample article page:

The pages were designed to be fluid in order to scale nicely both horizontally and vertically on a computer screen. Images on articles have a maximum width, but will scale down to fit well on horizontally squashed pages (below left). Also, the fade at the bottom of the window moves with the height of the browser to accomodate vertical scaling (below right).

The "Tell Me Another..." link at the bottom of each article will take the viewer to another urban legend selected at random. The background image of each page on the site is also selected at random.