JANE ZHANG


ABOUT ME

I’m a Communication Design major at Washington University in St. Louis who is also pursuing minors in Human-Computer Interaction and Computer Science. In my work, I strive to explore a diverse range of narratives, perspectives, and approaches. My favorite part of the design process is the iteration stage, especially the moment where I finally arrive at the version that addresses everything I’ve been trying to communicate.

Recently, I’ve been interested in the nuances of multilingual typography and how the characteristics of different languages’ letterforms can be leveraged to enhance a concept across multiple linguistic demographics. Outside of my work, I love stories in any form, whether that means books, movies, or music. Lately, I’ve been watching Summertime Rendering and listening to Jack Stauber. 

Feel free to reach out for work or friendship, and check out more of my work below!

HOME / CLIENT WORK / ARCHIVE


   

THE ONES WHO WALK AWAY FROM OMELAS


The objective of this project was to create a scrolling experience that explored time and space. I chose to create an interactive version of the short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin. The whole experience is approximately 283,000 pixels and 10 minutes long.View the site here



DEVELOPMENT

This section contains spoilers on the narrative and scrolling experience.

I wanted to leverage the structure of the scroll to reflect the themes of the story. To do that, I chose to depict the portion where the narrator describes the idyllic paradise of Omelas as a cycling horizontal scroll, with each cycle representing one year in the city. However, as the user scrolls through these cycles, the smooth running line becomes more and more chaotic, and calls of help start to drift in more frequently. 

In cycles eight through twelve, which is the average age that each citizen learns about the child, the user has the option to choose not to believe in the paradise of Omelas. If this option is chosen, the scroll direction will shift to vertical and take the user down into the “basement” where the truth of the mistreated child is explained. I chose to shift to a vertical scroll to parallel the physical descent into the basement and the metaphorical sense of sinking into the truth.

But at the bottom of the basement text, there is a hidden button that, when clicked, opens an external tab titled “Away” that contains text on those who choose not to live in Omelas anymore and leave after learning about the child. This section of the story starts at the bottom of the page and scrolls up to mimic the unintuitive, conscious choice to leave a place of comfort and venture into the unknown. I chose to navigate to an external page to allude to formally cutting ties with the cycle of idyllic years in Omelas.

There is no way to reset to the beginning of the scroll experience outside of navigating to the original link, as I wanted to emphasize the finality of leaving Omelas and the irreversibility of the years spent living on someone else’s suffering.