Interactive Carousel Design

For this project I immediately knew I wanted to create a three part character builder. This would take an interactive carousel from something you can click and look through to something you can play with. I’ve always remembered these character builders from childhood with fondness and I love any chance to bring adults back to the mindset of a child.

I originally thought it would be fun to illustrate my own characters for this project however I quickly realized that my time constraints were not going to allow for that so I went to the web to search for some images I could use. Pretty quickly into this search I came upon MoMA’s Surrealist Exquisite Corpse Gallery. In this experiment MoMA asked participants to describe one of three sections of a body. With help from AI, their descriptions were transformed into images and combined into single body creations.

While enjoying the designs created in the project I couldn’t help but feel MoMA had missed the whole point by not including an interactive carousel in their web design. I felt the character builder I wanted to created was exactly what this page needed.

This semester I have learned how design can be used to engage the viewer through color, typography, layout, and especially important in web design, Interaction. By inviting the viewer to interact with the design we let the viewer step deeper into our world. The MoMA Exquisite Corpse webpage is a prime example of how a cool project can become boring pretty quickly when all you can do is look at it. However, by using the interactive carousel character builder, we invite the viewer to join the project, they are now a creator too. This type of game or call to action is fun for all ages and would surely increase sharing and engagement for the site.

Check out the MoMA Exquisite Corpse page to compare.