Since I was behind on 1b and was advised to get photos first, this is actually the first draft of my story. For that same reason there is, unfortunately, not much that’s likely to change moving to the final draft, apart from making the style more polished. However, I do think this is a strong first draft; the narrative is complete and pretty much all of the photos and textual details I’d like are already in place, though one or two little things may stand to be rearranged.
The biggest challenges I’ve faced were pacing out the content and working with Shorthand itself. I have an admittedly limited gallery of photos for this project, and while I knew from my last session what the topic and themes would be, I’ve been worried throughout this piece that I wouldn’t have enough or balanced enough material to make a proper story. Luckily, with some deliberation, and before I had placed too many photos, I ultimately found myself writing a structure that lent itself to the set of photos I had while still feeling fairly organic and maintaining a regular rhythm between photos and text. Meanwhile, using Shorthand effectively has been difficult for me; I think the biggest reason why is that the kind of aesthetic design I’ve done in the past has mostly been on a fixed, paper-style page – in other words not a modern web story – so adjusting to an environment where I have to consider a highly dynamic browser page is tricky. However, I am starting to understand how to use some design techniques in this context, especially since we reviewed one of the Shorthand guides in class (Week 5).