The Unravelling Web
This book was designed to one of the ISTD student briefs 2019 - “Lost”. In it I investigated the problem of information loss on the World Wide Web and put it into a wider historical context of how information has been lost and preserved by humanity throughout its history. The book looks at the reasons for information disappearance, such as degradation of the materials, natural disasters or deliberate destruction; at the attempts to preserve it – from the ancient libraries to the Internet Archive of today; at the traces the disappeared data leaves behind and how they can be used to recover it.
As the topics covered in the book create a complex web, I introduced elements of hypertext into the book by adding inserts that contain articles related to something in the “body” of the book that act as pop-up windows on the web and marginal “links” that indicate other articles in the book related to what you are reading. The book brings together the traditions of book design and digital conventions, so, for example, the traditional folios are replaced with a progress bar which indicates where you are in the book. The use of bright colours enhances the “digital” look and helps with the navigation as each article is assigned its own hue within the gradient. Various typographic devices are used throughout the book to illustrate the various instances of information loss (or recovery).
