Emerging Possibilities - Butterworth 
 

Butterworth's "Ebayvironment" draws on Steven Johnson's ideas about the impact of the graphical user interface on our culture to examine the environment of ebay. The screen capture below demonstrates the DHTML animation in the title page. Each letter in the title circles around the previously "written" letters before landing in place. While the use of DHTML here adds little to the argument, the color choices on the title page evoke ebay's own color scheme.

One of Butterworth's interesting design choices is his decision to visually separate his words from the words of other authors. While the author's text is black, all quotations in the hypertext are blue. This feature is readily apparent in the screen capture below.

Butterworth chose to use horizontally scrolling text-based navigation (barely visible red text at the bottom of the above screen capture) to disrupt the user's sense of an author-determined path through the hypertext. While the choice of a black border and dark red text navigation is a significant design weakness, scarlet and black are the university's colors. The colors are an effort to brand the hypertext as a product of a student at Rutgers University.

 

Michael J. Cripps

 
 

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