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Much of what is written here is pertinent to the CD version of the work but there is plenty of information on how the construction was done and the design considerations of the collection. A lot of effort and work went into providing something that could be expanded and have some degree of future-proofing.
I have included this section for those who just have a deeper interest into what's behind the CD and for the benefit of those who may take up the challenge and add to the work later.
The Medium
Why choose a CD? Simply, this is cost. Producing a book of the work is not feasible however much I would have preferred to do it that way. I would never have been able to get it published and even if I had the money to pay for it myself, I would never recoup the outlay.
Electronic publishing does offer a very cheap alternative and is flexible. It does have certain creative advantages over the printed page and enables the work to be added to very easily. The downside is that as of the time of writing, not everyone has a computer to access the information. Another major drawback is that the average computer system today does not produce a high enough screen resolution really suitable for displaying photographs and is nowhere near the quality of printed work. Having said that, the print output from today's computer systems is truly excellent with resolutions and print quality that are hard to distinguish from conventional photographic processes. If you want to see the photos from the CD at their best - print them!
The Display Software
Why choose a browser? There are many reasons for this. It is generic and supplied free with just about every computer in the world, courtesy of Bill Gates. Everyone is familiar with the interface as it is used so widely for Internet access. It offers great flexibility both in design and construction although an absolute pig to work with compared to a 'slap-it-on-the-page' DTP package!. It will be around for years to come hopefully and makes updating the CD easy. Finally, creating what is a local website on a CD which is what I have done, means that without any modification whatsoever, the whole thing can be uploaded to a server on the Internet for an instant website. I have even included meta tags in every page ready for such a time. Mind you, because of some of the file sizes involved it will not be worth doing until everyone has broadband access.
Design
The design of the CD is fairly simple. It is auto-booting upon insertion and jumps to the title page (index.html). Clicking on the central image takes you to the main index page (main.htm). Note that both these pages have been optimised for 800x600 and for a browser that has all toolbars present at maximum size. They both feature Javascript that forces the window to open maximised no matter what resize the user has previously adopted.
The structure of the main index page relies heavily on the use of tables to produce a tight layout with multiple selection options. The two large graphics 'pillars' on either side are collages of images taken from various photos in the collection and created using layers and marquee effects in Adobe Photoshop.
The top four buttons Author's Notes, User Guide, Credits and Tech Notes open up half size, centrally located browser windows that are stripped of all navigation and controls apart from a vertical scroll bar.
The main menu below offers access to the collections of photos by category. When one is clicked, a browser display window opens and overlays the the index page. This is done using Javascript and the target window is loaded devoid of all navigation and user controls for maximum utilisation of screen area. It also uses Javascript to force the window to maximise. I know using a fixed size window is dangerous but this had to be done and I have included plenty of detailed notes in the user guide to hopefully avoid problems. Within this window there is a main, four cell table, that is used for the display of JPEG thumbnails of the photos for that section, and their descriptions. At the bottom of the page are navigation controls that enable forward and back browsing and closing of the window (again using Javascript), to reveal the index page below. The design of this window was done for simplicity and ease of construction and to allow maximum screen area with large thumbnails.
In most cases, this display window allows each image to be clicked on to provide an enlarged image and the option to print. The enlarged image is loaded into a new fixed size, centralised window, using Javascript and the image scaled automatically to fit the window. This new window has no navigation controls but is fitted with a close window and print option.The print option provides fixed size printing of the image that will centralise on an A4 sheet regardless of orientation.
The Images
The thumbnails on the image display pages were created automatically from the main pictures using a program called ThumbsPlus. It saved a tremendous amount of work as they were batch processed. However, they still needed to be individually processed to create the bevel and shadow effects and this was done using Macromedia Fireworks.
The scanned images were individually cropped and processed using a variety of graphics packages. Some required extensive work to achieve anywhere near a decent display quality. Quite a few were tiny prints of only about three inches by two inches and were scanned at an average of around 400dpi.
Most of the images were scanned at between 150dpi and 200dpi. This was done purely from a space point of view and should provide a reasonable quality for printing. I tried to keep file sizes to around 1MB as this meant in the future that the collection could be uploaded to the Internet once broadband access was widespread. I could have made the image sizes smaller for display and put a separate copy of the full images on the CD. This would make life more complicated and again cause space problems so all the images that display enlarged are scaled versions of the full size file.
I have mostly used PNG as the file format for the images. At the time of writing this is the best that is available and is a 'lossless' format that sadly has not gained widespread acceptance. The pictures of current views were taken using a digital camera and are in JPEG format.
THE BASIC EQUIPMENT USED:
Generic PC compatible computer (built by myself)
Umax Astra 2100 USB scanner
Yamaha 4416S CD Writer
Hewlett Packard 970cxi printerSOFTWARE:
Macromedia Dreamweaver
Macromedia Fireworks
Paint Shop Pro 7
Microsoft Word
Thumbs Plus for thumbnails
Windows Notepad
Adobe Photoshop
Extensis Intellihance
Xara Webster
Xara Webstyle
Netstudio
Neato Mediaface for CD labels. Files for these are in directory 'labels'.
Adaptec Easy CD Creator for CD creation.Many of the above packages were trial versions.
