ABSTRACT
Spoken and written texts have always drawn on multiple modes: aural, visual, and gestural, as well as verbal and textual. A good example of the multimodal complexity in websites is Twitch TV, a video streaming site often used by video gamers to livestream gaming sessions. Gunther Kress, a pioneering scholar in the field of multimodality, describes the evolution in media from the printed page to the digital screen. The screen devices like smartphones, tablets, and laptop/desktop computers that interact with use interfaces to mediate that interaction. One important feature of interfaces is that they often use organizing ‘metaphors’ to structure the user experience. One of the organizing metaphors of MS Windows is the ‘desktop’. In order to design an environment inspired by the metaphor of ‘quantum paper’ the team used a range of visual resources, aiming to simulate a more tactile user experience and add a sense of depth to the interface.
