Chapter 10, Identity, and Typography

The authors really seemed to stress the importance of chapter 10, which really made me examine it closely, because the authors are usually so laid back. But with his chapter, they seemed serious and down to business. GIF files seem to be the most popular because they can be viewed on all computers, compressed, and can create animations. It was interesting to learn about GIF and JPEG files because those are the ones I use most often. I never really thought about them before. The section on image maps was interesting because I see those all the time, but I never knew what they were called. I automatically thought back to that Melanie Griffith website that we visited in class. Her home page was an image map.
At first glance, Sherry Turkle’s website portrays her as a professional career woman. Her entire website is about her job, career, what she does for a living, and all the accomplishments she’s achieved. Her second page lists everything that she has written and or published: books, reports, chapters, articles, notes, lectures, papers, affiliations, accomplishments, and other professional activities. Her final page is about her interviews and profiles. To me, her identity is a very professional one. I also get almost a conceited feeling of identity from her page. Everything on this page revolves around her accomplishments, it’s almost as if she is bragging about all that she has done. I don’t get a personal sense of identity from her at all. We know nothing else about her. Every single page has the same layout, text, and a picture of Sherry Turkle. She seems very guarded.
The identity I got from Robin Willilams’ website was a very approachable, conversational one. She seemed like a genuine person from the quote at the top describing her to her personal website to her books. Her identity seemed very real and true. She is not afraid of who she is and letting people know who she is. She’s very willing to share herself with anyone who cares to look at her page.
The typography website was interesting because before this, I had no idea what typography was. The part that interested me the most was learning that alignment, line length, white space, typeface, type size, and case were all part of typography because I never really associated them with anything; I just knew they were there. It was interesting to learn what they did and how they worked.