We began work on this website late in the season, when Prabhav, knowing that Jacob would be interested, emailed him the URL of thinkquest.org and told him about the competition. Immediately, Jacob knew the perfect person to ask to join us, Anand. He too was interested, but knew that we would benefit from the work of one more person: Alex.
Each of us had different strengths, so dividing the tasks was easy. Prabhav was an efficient researcher and backend programmer, so to him went the task of investigating possible topics. Eventually, after throwing out veritable lists of ideas, we decided that the best topic in terms of importance in the modern world and feasibility was terrorism, and we set to work.
Alex and Anand, being our most skilled artists, were assigned the job of creating a mockup of the site. Alex applied his knowledge of graphic design to create a spectacular sample layout. Meanwhile, Prabhav and Jacob researched content for the website and critiqued the others’ work. Using this new knowledge, Jacob then designed a meaningful banner and worked on heading titles. It was, however, nowhere close to the final design. After weeks of editing and changing color schemes, we finally arrived at the perfect layout and decided upon our graphical content. Finally, once we had all approved of the design, Anand reconstructed it in Illustrator, the next step in making our vision a reality.
Jacob then coded a modular design framework in PHP off of which the others could build. This unified our formerly disparate efforts, and finally, we began to see the masterpiece we had so long toiled blindly to create.
Problems and Solutions
From the start, we knew we would operate harmoniously. Everybody was highly motivated and willing to push themselves to the next level in order to make this site work. Even so, we had problems with time; we ended up finishing the site in a last-minute rush. This was probably a result of how busy all of us are as we all take far too many AP classes and engage in a plethora of extracurricular activities.
Other than lacking time to work, we had few serious problems. Whenever somebody was confused or didn’t know how to resolve an issue, we combined our skill and experience to surmount the difficulty. For example, initially, the banner was designed without considering the color scheme of the site itself. The problem was that although everybody loved the banner, it clashed with the color scheme of the rest of the design. Alex, who was in charge of the layout at that time, couldn’t figure out how to effectively bring the two pieces together, so we collaborated.
After a few days of discussion and sorting through the opinions of various other people, we realized that the raw colors could not be combined synergistically. Just as we were about to despair, in a flash of insight, we collectively realized that there was a simple solution: adjust the color balance and levels. Anand immediately set to work, changing the various parameters of the colors of the images to maximize their combined aesthetic value. After a few more critiques and Photoshop effects, the image was ready to go, now an asset instead of an eyesore.
As we neared the final stretch, we delegated Alex the task of designing a video that encapsulated the essence of our website. He quickly set to work, determining what special effects would be beneficial and how to structure the movie. We all helped him, offering him advice and finding film clips and pictures for him. Finally, he finished his first draft, complete with a myriad of animations that effectively transitioned between the various scenes. Then, we collaborated further, trying to figure out make the video the most effective. After days of thinking, we arrived at the million-dollar answer: we would add in a song denouncing terrorism (although we later had to remove it due to copyright issues, we all still agree that it would have been better). As soon as Alex had integrated this into the video, we saw that the overall effect was wonderful. We then uploaded it to the website and after some brief experimentation with the resolution output, we finished our formidable (if we may say so ourselves) introduction video.
Throughout this entire process, Prabhav and Jacob researched content. Usually Prabhav would research various aspects of terrorism and write a mock up of the content. Then Jacob would turn the raw facts into readable content that could be displayed on the website. Since Jacob was a skilled creative writer, and Prabhav an efficient researcher, they complemented each other nicely.
Anand was our major programmer. He programmed the structure for the website and made sure that our navigation menu and such were graphically pleasing. He was also allocated the task of making a flash slideshow for the home page. At first, he slightly misunderstood the requirements, but when he uploaded his work, we quickly found the problems and pointed out to him how he could make it look better. After some more critiquing, we arrived at the perfect slideshow.
Our overall success was probably a result of our significant experience in our assigned fields and our skill with problem solving. To us, designing this website was like designing any other: simply a matter of course.
Our Community Work
To show the significance of terrorism to the outside world, Jacob compiled a presentation on the effects of terrorism and presented it in our school. We hoped to teach the students about the effects of terrorism and thus encourage activism within our generation. The presentation was a huge success; Jacob even presented in Spanish (as a project for AP Spanish) thus projecting our knowledge to all parts of our community.