« La Carte des Lieux Oubliés » is a website made under three weeks made as a school project by my group of friends and myself, called "The Web Bees".
It was not the first project of the year but it was a major turning point for all of us : not only did it help us understand more advanced portions of the languages we had learn over the year, it also showed us how to create original interfaces and push our own limits concerning what we thought we knew about designing on the Web.
The point of the project was to create or use a API or a database to make some data visualisation out of. We went for the latter and created our own set of data, about places in Belgium that have been supposedly abandoned and left to decay. With that data, we then created a game where the user has to find all places on the map of the country with a compass locked to the mouse.
Clicking on a place hinted by the compass would indicate some relative data to the user, such as a description of the events that lead to the place's current situation, a picture (modified to fit the style we were going for) and some coordinates.
Both during the design process and during the development we went miles of what we originally thought, and the result is far better than we all could have imagined : what first was a simple, minimalistic interface that ressembles all there is on the web nowadays, turned out to be quite the opposite thanks to the more "timey" approach we eventually decided upon, inspired by Dave Shea (and many others !)'s CSS Garden.
The grid just below shows how many iterations we went through before settling on a final design.
It was a pleasure for my team and myself to work on this project.
Thanks to Marie Potemberg, Camille Mouvet & Guillaume Pihard for the fun times we had.
Looking forward to sharing more of these !
