The technical aspirations of a noob.

Here are a few examples of the sorts of things I would like to achieve from a technical perspective on my site. Some of the confounding factors.

Some of the content will be like Learning to Love You More, where I will invite submission of work, which could be images, text or.... gulp... video/animation/sound. Although the projects will be more fine arts than these ones. In fact the projects won't be like this at all, so bad example? LTLYM should give a sense of how the provocations might work as cultural probe. The site is about inspiring creativity, so it's important to me that the look be inspiring too, and that each task/project be visually reflected in the design. In my (vast and overachieving) imagination, this means that every project will have a different section of the site, and will function differently.

I imagine my site as a mythical octopus; the head being the homepage starting point, and the provocations as tentacles numbering many more than eight, each with a different design and operating style. The media must inspire above and beyond the simple brain tickle of the provocation.

I can start with one or two tentacles at first, and add more on as time goes by, hopefully building a digital "scuplture" of sorts. What this means in practical terms is, if I have participants submit, say for example, a stamp design based around a simple, personal brief (the provocation), then I might (just by way of example) want it to upload into a collage type pattern on the site where it builds with the work of others to create a visual cloud, or an incredible montage, like on Exactitudes. I might even want to load these submissions to the site onto the collage according to a colour, or design matrix that I have created, like you can see on the Shop by Colour section of Etsy To complicate matters, and just by way of example, I would like a collage like this to be explorable in some way, say, if you roll over with the mouse, you can look at a stamp in the montage more closely, or read comments by the person who submitted it.

A tentacle my be, depending on the tone and intent of the provocation, be a flowering of words or images, along thematic lines, like the work of Stephanie Posavec's Writing Without Words. Another tentacle may traverse a map, or navigate a pathway through concepts, like the site for the film Donnie Darko. Or there may be an arcade-like tentacle, which generate amusements, like Chip Wass's World of Wassco. And this would be one 'tentacle', of the site, with several others, all with different appearances relating to the task it concerns. I also have to think of a home page starting point from which these all spring, which is easy to navigate, easy to return to, and holds the whole thing together.

In terms of time frame, I would like to get the home page, and maybe one or two of the simpler of these 'tentacles' up and running before the end of the year, but I would like in the coming year to create ever more beautiful 'tentacles' to add on, building up the site as I learn more. This all depends on what I can learn and when.