Design = Life

Finally I have Visual Headlines (VH) polished up enough to post it here.

Summary: Basically what VH does is take a headline from CNN, separate that headline into an array of relevant words (words like ‘of’ and ‘the’ are excluded) and searches Flickr images for those tags using Flashr (an AS2 wrapper for the Flickr API). An array of images is returned for each individual word in the headline. Images are then displayed next to each other in a strip below the original headline.

Results: The result is pretty interesting and sometimes funny or even shocking. While presenting this project to some freshmen New Media students the headline I clicked on was “Six shot at Nevada school bus stop” and a couple of the images that were pulled back were of a gun and children, of course seeing the images next to one another with the headline above enhances the meaning of the headline. When I first started testing Nathanael Wolfe suggested that I try an RSS feed from somewhere other than CNN like Perez Hilton’s site usually those headlines yielded funnier results.Future Plans: Aside from speeding up the response times for getting images I would really like to give the user a way to input their 6 favorite RSS feeds, or select from a list of approved feeds so that they have a customized visual headlines page. Also I think deep linking would be a great way to bookmark your favorite RSS feed and only view that.If you have any suggestions for Visual Headlines please let me know. I would love to hear what you think!

This entry was posted Tuesday, January 1st, 2008 at 8:31 pm and is filed under Announcements, Case Studies, Concept, Design, Projects, RIT. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.