Bulger on Trial is very striking initially with its photo of a young Bulger. An extreme closeup, most likely a mugshot, and very effective as Bulger seems to staring directly in to viewer/reader’s eyes. This helps show the intensity of the individual and also of the stories to come. When you hover over The Stories it pulls down divisions that each have their owns headers and a summary of the stories they link to (seemingly). What is great here is that they are positioned where they cover Bulger’s eyes. This takes us away from his stare, and forces us to consider the coming tales of his deeds. Clicking on either The Gangster, or The FBI agent, or The Politician only leads us to a photo of each of these co-conspirators. This was slightly disappointing but they are decent photos however except for the last one. Courtroom drama is great but I can’t tell who my focus is to be on in that photo. Out of the two story-telling sections The Victims is a bit more intense not because of textual content, but because of its design. The design is seemingly simple, but effective. After a background photo of law enforcement possibly exhuming a body or bodies, and a short opener we get to the first victim of 19 who will be profiled. Having each name written in white with a large black border spanning the length of the page forces you to assume some importance of what is to follow. Also, the placement of each victim’s name aligned left tells us that none of these stories is the main story. The Victims header that was centered at the beginning of the piece makes each “victim header” into sub-headers all of equal weight to one another. The use of dropcap was good aesthetically to begin with, until you realize that not every section uses it which is distracting since we are supposed to be seeing every victim in the same light. There should be some consistency in the use of dropcap since there is mostly consistency everywhere else including audio for each section. The lack of consistency in use of photos is not really a big issue.

Of the two pieces I can take away the use of photos (extreme closeups). and of audio clips. The idea of having a short audio play when you first reach the site is good, but only if the content of the clip is good and not too long. Short attention spans need short attention, and could be turned off by long audio while they read, but the Survivor piece is effective in its choice. I would also use the alignment in The Victims that gave a feeling of sub-headers to the story. This gave a feeling of components to the story instead of pushing one character in front of others.