I. Opening
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As any designer knows, the project imagined at the beginning is frequently not the project that emerges as the final result. As they develop their ideas, they encounter resources and obstacles that push these ideas in new directions, shut down some options, and open up other possibilities that they had never considered before starting out. Aristotle notes that "[m]ost of the things about which we make decisions, and into which therefore we inquire, present us with alternative possibilities. For it is about our actions that we deliberate and inquire, and all our actions have a contingent character; hardly any of them are determined by necessity" (28). It is this process of contingency in the context of webtext design—of developing ideas and shifting designs as possibilities and obstacles emerge—that I explore in this dissertation.
The images below demonstrate this process on the homepage of three webtext projects; these projects and their changes are presented and documented in full in this project's Case Study Hub. Click on an image to enlarge it; arrow through the images on the left or right to see the selected homepages for each draft in sequence.
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