🌐 Web Sites & Stories v1

Since the dawn of the Internet, we’ve thought of websites as metaphors for places to visit — web “sites,” navigated to via web browsers like Safari (or the now-forgotten Internet Explorer). This metaphor lets us think of the Internet not as a singular medium, but as a network for distributing interactive, digital experiences. In effect, every website is a world with its own internal logic. The web designer or developer’s challenge is to define these rules for interaction in a way that makes sense to visitors. Therefore, the goal of a website is to convey meaning to an audience through interaction, not just graphics.

In this course, we’ll play the role of both web designer and developer to discover the full gamut of possible user experiences that websites afford. Students will learn industry-standard tools and practices for prototyping and launching websites, including Figma, Webflow, GitHub, and web programming languages (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript). The course explores websites as a paradoxical medium with clashing creative and commercial motives, united by the common purpose of telling stories through interactivity.