Hello Internet Timeline

Welcome to my exhibit where I will explore the same online community which is centered around a podcast called Hello Internet through my intervention. For my intervention, I’ve decided to create a visual, interactive timeline for the audience to use because I wanted to have something that members of the Hello Internet community or “Tims” could go back to get a better grasp of how Hello Internet has evolved over the years and find useful highlights that have occurred over the years. My audience for this intervention is mainly existing Hello Internet members because I think they would understand and get the most value out of having a resource like this. I think this would be a great tool for anyone who wants to recall a past event that is mentioned on the podcast (which tends to happen a lot) and can’t remember exactly when it happened. Also, it would just be fun to remember older events for longtime members. While this is mainly geared towards existing members, I think it’s also ok for non-members to read through it because they may also get a better sense of how this community has grown over the years.

The context for this intervention is that the audience is supposed to look through the entire thing for a general sense of how Hello Internet has progressed or to look for specific events and trying to figure out when they occurred. The genre for this intervention is obviously a timeline but also unlike traditional timelines, my intervention is interactive. So the user can click on events and get a short description or video on the specific events that have occurred. Also with the timeline, you can zoom in and out to get different perspectives in terms of time.

As for the design choices made for this timeline, I opted to go for a generally solid color scheme. I originally wanted to make it monotone because the official color scheme of much of the podcast is different shades of gray. However, I decided that this was a bit too dull after some feedback and instead opted to color code the events on the timeline. The gray events on the top side of the timeline are official podcast episodes while the events on the bottom side of the timeline are red, blue, and green for merchandise events, general events, and miscellaneous respectively. For other design aspects, I opted for a normal Helvetica font because there was no option to change the text font with the timeline editor I was using. This works out fine because most of the text used in official Hello Internet podcast notes are written in Helvetica anyways.

As for the modes in this project, I couldn’t make much use of the aural mode this time around because timelines inherently don’t make much room for it. However, you can still hear small blooping noises when you run your cursor across the different elements which
are somewhat satisfying. Mainly, this timeline is a gestural, visual and linguistic modal project. The gestural mode comes from the fact that this timeline is highly interactive as you can zoom in and out to adjust the timeline perspective and click on different events to get more information. The visual element comes from the fact that timelines are structured visually and my timeline is color-coded for clarity between types of events. The linguistic modal component just comes from the fact that each event has a description attached. The spatial modal element mostly comes from the spacing between each event which is adjustable thanks to the interactivity of the timeline.