A short history of telescopic text
Our new website has been live for a few days now, and we’ve had feedback from our colleagues, our peers, and in social media. Many of the comments have been positive, but some of them have been negative.
One aspect in particular that we wanted to look at in this article is the interaction paradigm of ‘telescopic text’, which we are using to tell our story of a new digital agency.
The earliest, eponymous incarnation of telescopic text in the browser that we are aware of was Joe Davis’ 2008 experiment. We don’t know where the inspiration for that page came from, but transformative text/wordplay has probably been around for as long as people have had access to pens and paper. Lewis Carroll’s word ladders are in some ways a precursor, albeit a wholly analogue one.
Joe Davis’ site became popular enough that it was spun off into a tool, so that anybody who wanted to could create their own telescopic text experiment. The tool is still up and lives at http://www.telescopictext.org. As you play around with it you realise that it’s possible to create experiences that are far more complex than a simple linear narrative.
One such experience, related to the telescopic text experiment both in terms of visual design, tone, and interaction, is the fantastically compelling text-based adventure A Dark Room, published in 2013.
While text-only adventures have a rich history roughly dating back to the early days of personal computing in the 80s, A Dark Room eschews the flashing cursor, call-and-response interaction that many of them used, preferring instead a gradual revealing of the game and the story’s complexity, all on a stark white background with plain black text.
More recently the author Alan Trotter created his own promotional site, making use of the same visual style and interaction paradigms common to previous ‘telescopic text’ experiments, but he added a new twist. Alan Trotter increased the complexity of his site by serving three parallel ‘texts’ which the user can expand at a rate which suits their own interests. Alan’s site is of course one that we were aware of when we decided to make use of telescopic text in the new Dare site, but it was by no means our only influence.
It is heartening to know that experiments with telescopic text continue, and as recently as yesterday the newest one came out — a parody of our own site — http://thisisntdare.com. While we don’t endorse the sentiment of this site, we do embrace the debate.
We will of course see many more applications of the telescopic text technique, each with their own twist on the interaction and experience, and each contributing to the lineage of this uniquely digital method of presenting copy.
For us, though, the message is more important than the medium.
