Reflection: Final Project

Because I am interested in digital/online media and publishing options, I wanted to find a dynamic way to present my final 13 meditations that leverages an electronic medium as a resource. Blogs, as they have been colloquially known for years, are the Web’s logs, or self-published “books.” The ease of self-publishing coupled with the cost (nothing, in most cases, depending on the service you use) makes it the most democratic, equal-opportunity option for writers everywhere.

Blogs are also the easiest way to distribute your musings to the masses. Whether or not the masses want to partake of your offering is another matter altogether.

I am very familiar with this way of “making a book” and I wanted to return to a safe, comfortable way to express my ideas, so the process of meditating on Brown could be the point and the place where I focused all of my energy. I didn’t want to compound the process by having to contend with the physicality of the house for my idea—or the bound book.

The first thing I did was to find the grounding image for the “Little Brown Book” blog—a sepia toned homage to literary antiquity. Then I used the question “What does Brown sound like?” to find music that evoked the essence of the colour. As you’ll note, I used the literal and figurative as inspiration for the selections I chose.

Because of the nature of my book, I was able to add actual sound—one element of the very dynamism I was after.

I could not find a free download of the one song, the title of which serves as the title of the blog, so I found , instead, an exciting video presentation that uses the song. I was able to embed that video as a post and in that way, have been able to make it stand out more than if it were simply part of the streaming playlist.

Because I was so comfortable with the medium, I had leftover energy to find solutions to little problems like this one. In this instance, comfort meant liberty. I felt free to meditate by way of quick snippets or longer posts and short stories.

Using some combination of the museum photos I took, other images I already had, and “found” images from walks around my neighborhood, I was able to settle on the photos upon which I wanted to meditate in an intuitive way.

I was also able to embed, via 3rd-party functionality, another stream of photos. In this way, the photos could be included on the periphery without junking up the meditations. I worked to consider the layout of the blog and the flow of the elements and how they worked in concert.

What I learned, or what was confirmed for me, is that creativity is cumulative. Following one trail led to more trails to follow. The final project is streamlined and clean. It’s simple and entirely representative of what I saw in my head before it began.