Online mood board - https://www.pinterest.com/pigottlaura/parallax-website-the-holocaust/

 - "The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke

 - "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 - In Buddhism, the swastika is a symbol of good fortune, prosperity, abundance and eternity. http://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/symbol-swastika-and-its-12000-year-old-history-001312

 

 - In Ancient Greece, Pythagoras used the Swastika under the name ‘Tetraktys’ and it was a symbol linking heaven and earth, with the right arm pointing to heaven and its left arm pointing to Earth. http://www.ancient-origins.net/myths-legends/symbol-swastika-and-its-12000-year-old-history-001312

 

 - BBC The Story of the Swastika https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_reuMKpgow#t=251

 

 - in late October 1944, Anne Frank and her mother were transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau camp to Bergen-Belsen camp. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005210

 

 - Anne Frank died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp approximately 3 weeks before the prisoners there were liberated. http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005210

 

 

ParallaxWebsite001 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite001-color-theme-5340734/

This monochromatic colour palette is based this image, which contains a rich shade of brown, in varying tones. I like to contrast between each shade, and I think the overall drabness of the colours fits well with the theme of my website. The main thing Im aware is missing from this scheme is green and blue hues, which could come in handy if I wanted to bring in elements of sky and/or grass. 4/10

 

ParallaxWebsite002 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite002-color-theme-5348001/

This monochromatic colour palette is quite simular to ParallaxWebsite001 as far as the hues. It is loosley based on this image. I have tried to add more of a tint to the colours so that they wouldn't appear as dark, but I feel that this has resulted in too little contrast between the shades, and also has lost the dark effect I was originaly aiming for. I do like some of these colours individually though so I may add them in to a future combination if I need to. 3/10

 

ParallaxWebsite003 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite003-color-theme-5340739/

This complementary colour palette is based on this ParallaxWebsite002, with some additional blues added in for creating sky elements. Although originally I thought this would be a good idea, now that I see these colours side by side I think they look a bit too cheerful (compared to the previous two) for the topic I am undertaking. 4/10

 

ParallaxWebsite004 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite004-color-theme-5340766/

This monochromatic colour scheme is quite simular to the first two schemes I attempted, but with the shades slightly closer together. I really don't think these colours sit well together. 2/10

 

ParallaxWebsite005 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite005-color-theme-5348030/

This was an experiment to try and bring some colour into an otherwise bland monochromatic colour scheme. I think this scheme would be better suited to a beach setting, as opposed to the green, forest setting I have envisaged. 0/10

 

ParallaxWebsite006 - https://color.adobe.com/ParallaxWebsite006-color-theme-5340725/

This analogous colour scheme is based primarily around the greener hues of the colour spectrum. Although I like the palette on the whole, I don't think it is suitable for this particular project. The green's remind me too much of Ireland, and could be better suited to an Irish history website. 2/10

 

 

1) The liberation of the victims of the Holocaust is celebrated each year on January 27th, with this year marking the 70th anniversary. On this date in 1945, the prisioners of the Auschwitz concentration camp were released.

 

2) For the majority of survivors however, liberation was not attained for many more months. One such camp was Bergen-Belsen, located in Germany.

 

3) Between 1933 and 1945 there were over 20,000 camps built across Europe. These included Transit Camps, Concentration Camps, Labor Camps and Extermination Camps. The majority of these were sub-camps of larger ones, including Auschwitz.

 

4) Prisoners were transported between camps using the vast train network which spanned across Europe. The cattle cars in which they were transported had been used for transporting animals, so were unsanitary, without windows, and extremely over crowded. The journey could take up to seven days, depending on the location of the camp. Food and water were rarely provided, and due to this, alot of the victims did not survive the journey.

 

5) Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which originated as a Prisioner of War camp, was converted to a concentration camp in April 1943. In the two years that followed, even though Bergen-Belsen was not used as an extermination camp and therefore contained no gas chambers, approximately 37,000 prisioners died here.

 

6) In late 1944 Bergen-Belsen was thought to have contained 15,000 prisoners. By April 1945, this number had risen to 60,000 due to the evacuation of prisoners from other camps around Europe. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were among the 85,000 additional prisoners who were relocated to Bergen-Belsen, when they were evacuated from Auschwitz in late 1944.

 

7) Anne Frank and her sister Margot died in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in March 1945, just three weeks before the prisioners were liberated.

 

8) On the 15th of April 1945 British forces entered the Bergen-Belsen camp. They released 60,000 prisoners, and discovered the remains of 13,000 more. Of the 60,000 rescued, more than 10,000 of them died within a matter of weeks of liberation from malnutrition and disease due to the conditions in which they had been found. 

 

9) As with may camps, after Bergen-Belsen was evacuated, the entire camp was burned to the ground to prevent the spread of disease (primarily Typhus).

 

10) An estimated 6 million people lost their lives during the Holocaust. It is estimaed that of all those who arrived to Auschwitz on the cattle cars, almost 80% were selected for immediate death. Of those who survived the selection process, many more died of disease, malnutrition and dehydration.

 

11) "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." - George Santayana

10 Background / Foreground Elements
1) Train
2) Trees
3) Mountains
4) Auschwitz camp
5) Bergen-Belsen camp
6) Train tracks
7) Sliding doors (of the carriages)
8) Fire
9) Grass
10) Rain

 

 

Typeface
I have spent alot of time looking through various typefaces, and have made some concious decisions as far as the look and style that I am going for. I want a sans serif, low contrast, medium weight font, with a vertically centered x-height, descenders that maintain the same strength as the stems the capital characters and ascenders which dont break the caps height of the typeface.
The typeface cannot be decorative, scripted or embelished in any way, as this is quite a serious subject matter, I need a strong typeface to carry it.
I also need the numerical figures to be in uppercase. This is of particular importance as alot of my infographic elements include reference to facts and figures containing numerical values.
When testing whether a typeface met these criteria I tested them with the phrase "hH256go" as this allowed me to see characters which would generally represent samples of each of the specifications I wanted to meet.
Currently, there are only a limited set of typefaces that meet these criteria in my eyes:
 

            - Arimo

            - Europa

            - Helvetica Light

            - Muli

            - Nimbus-Sans

            - Noto Sans

            - Open Sans

            - PT Sans

            - Questrial

            - Roboto

            - Roboto Condensed

            - Ubuntu

 

            1) Wheels of Train Rotating

            2) Mountains, Trees and grass all moving at different rates (parallax)

            3) Rain Falling

            4) Text fading out and being replaced by new text as it fades in

            5) Doors of the train sliding shut

            6) Clouds moving across the sky

            7) Fire as Bergen-Belsen building disappears

            8) Transition at end with patterned graphics coming in from the top left and top right

            9) Number increasing from 0 to 6million as you scroll through the page to represent all the lives lost

           10) For the majority of the site, the train will be stationary in the centre of the screen,

                  with the other elements moving so as to give the parallax effect, but at the start and end of the site,

                  the train will move and the background will stay still, so as to give the effect of the train pulling

                  away from one side of the screen and arriving at the other.

When creating the sketches for the train, I spent some time researching what type of train would have been used at the time. The DRB Class 52 steam locomotive was one of the more common trains used to transport victims of the holocaust so I have based my graphics for the engine on this. I found this image particuarly helpful. I created the train box car based this image that I found of carriages that would have been used during the holocaust.

When I began trying to design to trees, I decided to do some research on what kind of trees would be present in the forests of Europe. The first sketches were just of general tree shapes, whereas the next two sets of trees represent a more specific range of trees that may have lined the trails of the train tracks. I found this website particuarly helpfull, and hence created trees that represented: Abies, Larix, Picea and a multitude of pine trees. This really helped direct my design desicions.

The design for the Auschwitz camp came for looking at images of the entrance through which the trains would arrive, such as this one. I tried to change the perspective so that it would be possible for the train to pull away from the building.

The design for the Bergen-Belsen camp was a bit more difficult, as I mentioned it my research, the building was burned to the ground in 1945 to prevent the spread of disease. I used images such as this one to get an idea of how it might have looked at the time.

The last image represents a rough idea of how my website will look from an overall point of view. The train will begin on the left of the screen and end at the right, with infographics and background/foreground elements being introduced along the way.

 

 

My first attempt at creating the train based on my sketches and reference imagery from my moodboard. As I have not made any definitibe decisions on the final colour scheme I am working in tonal values only, just so I can try and decipher how many shades I would need to created this particular object.