Instigating Imagination: Teaching Interface and Typography as Metaphor

Abstract

In today's template-driven environment of website design it is a challenge to teach students the concept of metaphor production for visual interfaces and inspire them to explore the inherent creative potential of screen-based media. This poster showcases student work from an introductory web design course project created to encourage students to think of a web space, interface, and typography in terms of metaphor. To this end, students produced small websites using text from Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities in efforts to form visual metaphors of the text's content based on their own novel subjective interpretations. The value of this assignment is in its alternative approach to teaching introductory web and interface design.