#macd104

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The labour force was put under increasing pressure to “adapt” and “upskill” to meet the needs of the changing marketplace. The new attitudes required by employers included social skills, problem–solving skills, independent and team working, a flexible approach to work, as well as workers ready to further upskill. In the future, people would have to demonstrate high levels of “employability” within their jobs and what Elraz (2013: 810) calls a “sellable self” which will be, “associated with the constant expectation to perform, manage–impression, self–promote and ‘sell’ oneself as an attractive product: with no ‘faults’, ‘weaknesses’ or ‘limitations’, always ready to be, and do ‘more’”.

COHEN, Bruce. 2016. Psychiatric Hegemony: A Marxist Theory of Mental Illness. Palgrave Macmillan: London

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Cargo

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Other pages

I created the other pages as a participatory experience, designing the content layout on a ‘Create’ page and within their categories, but also allowing the user to drag and interact with the content themselves. It was quite a fun and experimental process of choosing where the images could fit on the page, but made difficult by the way that Cargo relies on you to paste your content into columns and the way that interacts with lines of code.

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Context

I included this page to give the historical background that I mentioned, using the fish curser the user can look at photographs associated with the event, while learning about them.

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Home Page

For the home page I decided to include a centralised contents bar, which when hovered over turns green, using my countryman font. Each navigation option shows a different set of relevant images that can be found in that section. The top left shows “The Countryman Archive”, which is a link to this home page, and also the dates (1984 – 1989), the dates of the books which goes to the Context page when clicked. I’ve also included an instagram link to a social media page for the site. 

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Testing different layout for my Cargo Site

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(104) Website Design

It’s difficult to categorise what I’ve been working on per week, as my practice has been so sporadic from working on different projects alongside, and Covid distractions. The biggest struggle I’ve had during this time is documenting how I’ve been keeping to a continuous and healthy rhythm.

I made a few prototypes of style for the home page of the website, as I wanted to get my head around the coding on Cargo. It was really difficult at first, but after this experiment I started to understand it, and I’m now confident using it (I’ll be using it again for my portfolio website). Luckily Cargo has a help page, which I used alongside google, what I learnt from Robyn, and pure luck / guesswork. Some of the visual outcomes were quite interesting, but it all felt a bit overcomplicated and unrefined until I came to my design conclusion. An idea I kept going back to was using symbols that were built into Cargo, on the navigation page. This was a reference to the brief, recreating the old content to something that’s a part of everyday life in these mid-digital times – emojis. But this didn’t end up in the final design, as it made it slightly too complicated.

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Final typeface