Thinking Through Production

These two sites have been designed to shape your sense of the difficulty and focus of searching online, and to shape your sense of what the Web is and what it is for. Why do you think the Google site has been designed with so much white space and with a logo typeface that is round, even, and presented in cheerful, even childish colors? Why do you think the site is named “Google”? Why all those “o”s? Why might the designers of the Yahoo site have decided to make it so full? Why use the colors they have?

Write up a rhetorical analysis of the two sites, focusing on how the two different sites have different senses of their audience and their audience’s purposes. (You might also compare these sites to several others, such as Clusty or Answers.com.) Although on the surface these search engines have the same audience—people who use the Web—they think of their audiences as having very different purposes for searching and very different attitudes about using the Web.

Using your analysis, design a new search engine for people who might not use Google or Yahoo.

• Try changing the colors of the screen. (In Photoshop, go to the Image menu and choose Adjustments then Hue/Saturation; move the Hue slider to make dramatic changes in the colors of the screens.)
• Change the characters. How would the game be different if the characters were in their sixties or were infants? How would the game be different with characters of different ethnicities, or if the characters were handicapped or of varying body types?
• Change the objects being used or manipulated. What if the gun were a fish, or the jewels a pomegranate?

How do your changes affect your sense of the purpose of the game?

Design a game that has very different purposes from any you now play. List the purposes of all the different games you can, and find a purpose not covered.