Project A
Exhibition Name: Gundams-r-us
Student: Sam Clarke
ID: U3025628
Tutorial Time:
Tutor: Mitchell Whitelaw

Gundam Exhibition

For this Project I chose to curate an online exhibition.  I felt that this particular choice would be best as graphic design is my course and this was the most creative medium.

For this online exhibition i chose the subject Gundam’s.  A definition of what a Gundam is; A high performance mobile suit used in a work which is part of the Gundam franchise. Gundam’s, like all mobile suits are large humanoid combat vehicles initially developed for use in outer space conflict. The first Gundam was developed as part of the Earth Federation V-Project in 0079 of the Universal Century, to counter the Principality of Zeon’s technological superiority. Needless to say, it was a success.  Gundam’s are characterized by their signature V-Antenna, two eyes, and a somewhat blocky anthropomorphic design. They are often white, with red and white components, and are usually piloted by the heroes of the story. Note: All Gundam’s are mobile suits, but not all mobile suits are Gundam’s.

For this exhibition I choose to display imagery that showed the Gundam craze and how Japanese people’s lives can be overtaken by this franchise.   I choose to curate a rather large exhibition as I wanted to reinforce the overwhelming size and popularity of the franchise.

My first step was to search the internet trying to find an appropriate host for the exhibition.  I settled upon Tumblr as I was already comfortable with its interface and how it worked with images.  My next step was to find a way to link the images found on Flickr to my Tumblr account.  This proved to be more difficult than expected. 
I first tried using the links of the Flickr images, but this looked like a reference page and was stale, not looking like an online exhibition. 

The next step was to try what we were taught in class, i attempted to RSS feed the images from Flick to my Tumblr, but this was also unsuccessful.  This set back made me have to research RSS feeds in more depth.  After that i attempted to save all my images on delicious as book marks, then RSS feeding them as photos directly to Tumblr, again I was unsuccessful.

After yet another failure i searched the net for Image book marking websites, which were similar to delicious but allowed you to save images rather than web addresses.  I stumbled across a site called vi.sualize.us, this site allowed the user to upload creative commons images, at the same time as displaying credit to the author, it also allowed extensive tagging for organization and categorization.

Another pro of vi.sualize.us was that it allowed you to send information through to Tumblr as an RSS feed of images, this allowed people to see the content hosted on vi.sualize.us as photos on Tumblr. Vi.sualize.us also applied captions at the bottom of every image that linked back to the original author and other pieces of their work.  I feel that this ensures that any work hosted is linked back to the original author and allows users to view other pieces of their work, therefore connecting information in more than one way.

I chose to make my Blog very simple, I feel that the simpler the layout and design the easier it is to first navigate and secondly be drawn to the images in the exhibition rather than fancy graphical elements. I have used the colours from the main character in the Gundam series as the basis of my colour scheme.  Red, white and blue are the three main colours that i feel keep a connection to the Gundam franchise furthermore stopping the Blog looking overworked and tacky. 


The Blog is in a conventional format of the most recent post at the top and then descending through the earlier posts.  This was done as other themes stretched my images and cut bits off.  I chose to keep simple recognizable conventions in my layout so that it was assessable by a wide variety of users with different skill levels.

The Gundam Blog is relatively big in size however like stated earlier this was only to reinforce the concept of how popular the franchise actually is.  The book marking site I found makes categorizing and displaying this content easy and in turn makes it very easy to navigate through images.

Through this assignment I have discovered new services and ways in which I can aggregate content into one place, so that all I get or any one that views a Blog gets is the good stuff.  Like quoted from our first lecture “aggregating data is like watching TV without the adverts”

My Exhibition Can be found at http://gundams-r-us.tumblr.com/