Concept
What interests me about mailinglists is the feeling of community or lack thereof that makes a list sucessful or not and how sucess can change a list. Since the development of a community takes place over time I chose the timeline early on for the visualisation. I also wanted the timeline to have an input function to make it more lively. For this project I chose the nettime list because it is fairly old, has gone through many stages an therefore promised a lot of material. And material I did find indeed, and soon I had to deal with organizing postings.
To better tell them apart I color coded the postings according to their subject. For the sake of coherence i shortened the postings to a few key sentences but linked them to the originals in the nettime archive to not loose that reference. In the timeline they are appearing in chronological order. So the user has to be able to navigate by years (chronologically) and by "threads". for the years I copied the "future generator" navigation by micz flor. for the navigation by threads i chose a diagram for better visualisation which also doubles as a roll-over image-map, where one can follow a thread by rolling over it with ones cursor.In the reply-field there is an option to create input for every year for spontaneous comment and/or creation of new references. I will participate actively in creating new refernces by interviewing people.
Since mailing lists are a fairly low-tech affair and have been around for a while now, when designing the website i chose the aesthetic of the first computer interface i can remember : white technoid letters on a sky -blue background (IBM PS 2).The "Teletext" font reflects the technoid pixely crudeness i was looking for. As a gif it is very clear and readable, unlike other fonts that are blurrier when used as photoshop generated images. In smaller versions (like 12 points and smaller) it resembles the webfont "Monaco" extremely closely, so for the rest of the text I used that font.One other feature of these early interfaces was the fact that there were little or no pictures and if there were any, they were very simple and mostly linear, i tried to reflect that in the design and use of images. The colors were not initially planned but became a necessity once the amount of material grew.