My Virtual Tour Journey

The virtual tour was not an idea that originally stemmed from the web team, but it did originate from the document design class. During one of the classes in the middle of the semester, a member of the catalog team presented a design for the catalog that was too good to dismiss. The design itself didn’t function for the catalog but did end up working for the website as a feature that would become one of the bigger highlights of the site. The design featured a Fitchburg Art Museum exhibition from the past with lines darting between different artworks in the museum. The lines were slightly transparent and gave of the feel of a Google Maps application. With the aesthetic presented to the team and creative juices flowing, the class determined that creating a virtual tour for Land Ho! would benefit the overall success of the site and make visiting the website even more worthwhile. The transparent white line design didn’t return, but the concept remained until the end of the project.

At the beginning of the project, I was concerned about how I was going to bring this great idea to fruition. I looked at applications online, searched for different ideas on how to make the tour a reality, and was unable to conjure up a simple solution. I continued to search and asked students in the Communications Media department on how to make the virtual tour. Thankfully, after a while of hunting and stressing, Seth Martin-Wick, a fellow Communications Media major, volunteered to help me with the endeavor. He was excited about the chance to make an interactive project that looked good, functioned properly, and was something he could use in his portfolio defense at the end of his senior year before internship. So the blueprinting and implementing began.

We started with a crash course on how to use several Adobe products that I have never used before. At first, it was overwhelming, but Seth was more than fine with answering my basic questions about InDesign, Bridge, and Acrobat. This was my first time seeing these programs in use. It was great to see someone who understands how they work use them as we discussed the sizes of the arrows, colors of the buttons, and what different pictures would link to. I sifted through the pictures provided by Mary and Emily and chose the images that I felt would work the best for the tour. Several professionally shot pictures did not make it into the tour because it was hard to incorporate every single one. Seth and I spent multiple long sessions sitting down together and refining the tour. After every Document Design class, I debriefed him and we worked on every single critique that was presented until the virtual tour was ready to be posted on the website. The process was terrifying at first, but incredibly rewarding when the product was complete and positive reception about the tour began to pour in.