Online Exibition Rationale

I did my online exhibition on Hampton Court Palace. I chose this because it is a topic that I find very interesting and I think that Hampton Court is a significant part of history that is still culturally important today. I also think that Hampton Court is fairly relevant to my course (Graphic Design) since I think that it is important to understand what was designed in the past, and its interesting to learn about where Hampton Court fit into the cultural landscape and which design movements influenced it. I am also currently doing a subject called “Design History” which discusses a lot of things similar to the palace.
I used to live in London, near Hampton Court so I actually had quite a few of my own photos from there, and there were a number on the Internet, which were under Creative Commons licences. Therefore it was no problem finding photos to support the information that I had gathered. I also think that Hampton Court Palace, is a good sized topic - not to broad but not to small, so there was plenty of information on it - but not so much that it would be impossible to work out exactly what to write.

Process
The first thing I did was gather up my own photos from the palace, these were taken on a film SLR camera a while ago, however when I scanned them in they were still really great quality! I then worked out what exactly I wanted to talk about, so I divided the subject into a few different subjects - Introduction, History, The Tudor Kitchens and The Palace Gardens. The introduction was a brief summary of the palace, so even if you didn’t know anything about it the summary could give the reader a basic idea. Then the history was a fairly detailed account of the background of the palace, when it was built (it was built in a number of different stages), the style of the palace (gothic, Tudor, renaissance and baroque) and who lived there (King Henry VIII etc).  I thought the Tudor kitchens were a really interesting aspect of the palace, because they are actually a very popular attraction, and learning about the kitchens gives you an idea of what kind of life the residents of Hampton Court lived. The grounds are also a huge aspect of the palace, and since they were heavily designed, the gardens are an important aspect of the history of design. I then found a lot of really great images on Flickr to back up the information.

I set up a new blog on Tumblr, so then once I had written everything out and gathered the pictures I put them all into blog posts. I used the “museum theme” for my blog, as I think that it’s very simple, yet effective, way of organising and displaying information. The black, red, white and grey colours look sleek and don’t interfere with the content of the blog. I also really like how the museum theme looks more like a proper website and less like a blog. I then changed the dates of each blog post so that they would appear in the right order. I had four text posts, which also had a few images in them. And four posts with just images and there captions. I really love how the museum theme crops the images to a square so that they are all the same size, but then you can click on them to see the full image in a new window.

Overall, I am very happy with my online exhibition. At first I was quite unsure of exactly what was expected of us in this assignment, however now I am quite proud of my work, and hopefully other people will enjoy it as well.