SBS is churning out multimedia sites left and right. Last month it was “Goa hippy tribe” and this month it’s “Dragon Children,” a site focused on Chinese-Australian students within Australia’s education system.
This topic became controversial after Amy Chua wrote the jaw-dropping article “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior” in the Wall Street Journal and was subsequently called ‘Tiger Mom.’
Regardless of what you believe, education (and lack thereof) is an important story to be told and lends itself well to multimedia.
There are several aspects I really like about this site:
Full-browser content
Integration of social content alongside the produced content
Deep links to the different sections
Audio clips with the graphics to provide complementary information
Aesthetics of the site are very clean and crisp (san serif fonts, customized video player, hi-res images, designed sections, etc)
While I like the navigation appearing/disappearing when a user rolls over the right-hand menu, I’m not married to the numbers or the section titles. I’m SO glad they didn’t use “video” or “graphic” to explain what media the user will see (I’ve harped against this practice many times in the past). That being said, what do the numbers 1-7 signify since the story is not sequential? It is not like chapters where I have to see 4 before I can move on to 5. In fact, I hopped around the entire site specifically not going in order and still came away with the same story as someone who may have experienced it in a linear fashion.
Thanks to Australia’s SBS and Canada’s NFB for continual inspiration. What, in your opinion, is the US equivalent?
Thanks for the critique! You’re right that it is a grab-bag project of different views and information. Though we did look for a way of offering a suggested narrative arc through the content, though by no means is it the only way of exploring the site. Possibly we made this sequence too explicit with the emphasised chapter numbers, where the order of the items in the navigation could have been enough.
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