For the assignment Jack’s Curios was created for, we were given the assignment to plan, design, and develop a site that touches on a subject from another course outside of our discipline. Though I didn’t have an idea come to me immediately, some discussion with my peers and a current fixation on true crime gave me the idea to base a design off of a psychology course I had taken.
From there, Jack’s Curios was designed as a small-scale alternate reality game (ARG) based around uncovering a murderer who has hidden his crimes via the use of a late 1990s virtual museum. For example, text is hidden by using the same colour as the background, creating chunks of the page where highlighting with the user’s cursor is required to be able to read it.
Every element of Jack’s Curios was designed to mimic period-accurate design conventions while using modern web standards to achieve these effects. The main inspiration for the layout of Jack’s Curios was the campaign website for Bob Dole’s unsuccessful 1996 United States presidential run. Some loose inspiration for this concept was also taken from the Halo 2 marketing ARG website, ilovebees.
