The Vectors Journal: Public Secrets is a project dedicated to giving information on California’s Prison department by sharing personal stories from some of the female prisoners and general facts about the prison system in the form of an “outside” “inside” view.

The site was extremely easy to navigate using the tabs called main menu, inside/outside, bare-life/human-life, and the public secret/utopia. In the editorial statement, Sharon Daniel describes the goal of the website is for the user to become more aware of the relationship between individual experiences and the broader social system as a “part of a larger resistance movement that aims to dismantle the prison system in pursuit of a more humane world.” The site does a great job of highlighting this goal through the construction of the site interface.

The main menu’s background is split midway through the screen horizontally into black and white, gray words on each. The same look carries throughout each of the tabs. For each tab, the black and white background helps distinguish the separation between the perspectives or contrasting ideas that are presented on each tab like “inside” and “outside” perspectives on the prison. This visualization makes the different thoughts on the subject very concrete and easy to digest as a viewer.

Within each tab, the information is presented by clicking on quotes that either appear in the black or white background, which represent the different perspectives presented in that tab. For example, in the “inside/outside” tab, quotes like “they can strip search you every time you come back from your job” appear in the black “inside” half of the screen while quotes like “women are getting blamed with more time for the same crime as men” in the white “outside” half of the screen. When you click on the quotes, an audio track plays of a women describing her story that involves the quote and the text written out. This format of presenting information is extremely powerful because just by looking at the screen, you can get an idea of what the site is trying to get across with the quotes, but there is an option to of further by investigating the quotes.

Overall, the main design idea of separating the screen into black and white to represent different ways to look at the California prison system is effective and clear. Sharon Daniel and his team did a great job.