Drawing from the typographic movement of the “words in freedom” of the Italian Futurists and the spacing and arrangement of Mallarmé’s composition on the page, this project expresses Sylvia Plath’s poem, “Mad Woman’s Love Song” as a parallax website.
Through movement, the visual compositions incorporating each stanza of the poem reveal and hide various elements of the design, changing the experience for the reader as the poem progresses. This effect is achieved through a website built and coded with a parallax jquery plug in and javascript library. Parallax is a special scrolling technique in computer graphics where background images move more slowly than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth and adding to the sense of immersion for the viewer.
I also used Google fonts to render the repeating elements of the poem in the same typeface. The more hopeful lines of the poem are rendered in flowery script, while the depressive nature of the refrain appears in very small sans serif type at the bottom. I tried to balance expressive typography with the colorful illustrations to create a readable viewer experience.
In such an intensely personal poem, the reader becomes an active participant who can reveal the words and illustrations by controlling the speed down the page.
This project combines handmade art with technology, considers the kinetics of type and words, and attempts to create a simulataneous and unified expression of a dreamy and
personal poem.