I wanted to take a socio-political approach with the theme of my Text project by picking something I found interesting and could relate to, hence I picked the theme of rights of women in the Islamic world, particularly Afghanistan under Taliban reign. My initial theme started off with two ideas: the first one was a series of rules from the Taliban Women’s manifesto on a blank white screen and the user could click on each rule to reveal a description of it. My second idea held the same text content but was fairly different, design-wise. The second idea was the one I finally went with and followed a blank black screen upon which there are hidden rules that initially cannot be seen by the viewer. By hovering their mouse around the screen, however, the user would be able to see a rule on each random part of the page. Upon clicking each rule, the text changes into a quote from the Quran or from an Islamic scholar with their views upon that particular subject of rule. I ended up going with the second option as my final choice because I felt like it was a more exciting and interactive experience in terms of user’s point of view.
I went ahead and used HTML and CSS to create the project with a black background and text sized 28px that I positioned using absolute positioning. Each rule was text created in separate divs so that I could position it individually using the left and top positioning options. Using this logic, I went ahead and positioned each phrase in random areas of the page so that it appears random. Because JavaScript was an issue, I used HTML/CSS to create the link between each “rule” and its “quote”. Creating a separate page for different “quote”, in which just the selected “rule” had changed text content into that of a “quote” but the rest of the text on the page was the same. This would allow the user to click back and forth between each “rule” and its appropriate “quote”, each of which led back to the other. For the sake of UI/UX, I added a title to the page in Arabic, reading “Taliban” and a date, just so that the viewer would know that the page has a purpose and potentially some content. Without this title, my peers and I felt that the website was a little confusing and misleading upon first glance.
