The piece's virtual Community Mural allows the user to assemble one set of site-appropriate imagery upon a wall. As always with a piece that is experienced onscreen, graphic design issues merge into computer-human ones. The onscreen presentation cycles back to the start after user forty-five seconds of inaction, for I assume the museum visitor has lost interest in the kiosk and moved on. Exhibit staff familiar with Macromind Director programmed two additional versions, one which turned it into a timed slide-show presentation visible when the glass cabinet containing all the exhibit kiosks was locked and unsupervised. The second version remained on just the interactive mural screen, for that proved the favorite of young children.
Color is used to designate different sections of the content.
Red designates the Garage Band section, blue-green for the Community Murals section, and a purple background for introductory and summary screens. Some design choices, such as the clear and readable Garamond font and the use of drop shadowed text boxes, were conciously borrowed from the style of the instructional disks produced by Apple Computer, Inc. 1985-89. I also followed the convention my Apple group followed of animation sequences preceding and leading into information whose navigation is then user-controlled. The fact that this is not in an established genre is exciting and validating to me. I'm pleased that it's my most recent interactive work yet alludes to previous pieces, as well as to my most resonant work in other artforms.