Veteran Affairs Canada: Telling pictures

It is not just the images themselves that make the Canada Remembers section memorable, but how they are used.

The Site

Veteran Affairs Canada (and its French-language ‘twin’, Anciens Combattants Canada) is a dual-purpose website, aiming to provide a service to Canada’s armed forces veterans and their families alongside chronicling their experiences and providing a memorial to their achievements.

Canada Remembers, one of the site’s five main sections, has menu items for official records and memorials (including the online Virtual War Memorial), History, Features, Veterans’ Week and The Book of Remembrance. Some of the overview pages for these sub-sections and many of the individual content pages make striking use of images to illustrate and reinforce the subject matter. For example, the overview page of Veterans’ Week shows a small child placing a Canadian flag against a war graves headstone. The images are unframed and use ‘cut outs’ and montage techniques to mount them within pages.

The Takeaway

Images from the battlefields of the twentieth century have an emotional hold that transcends the normally soulless environment of the computer screen. However, it is not just the images themselves that make the Canada Remembers section memorable, but how they are used.

Many sites, including big corporates with lots of resources at their disposal, seem to struggle when it comes to their use of, mainly, photographic imagery. As with print, pictures can enliven web pages and make them more attractive (both to look at and to draw people in). They can, similarly, be purely decorative (at best) or, more damagingly, a turn-off if the selection is dull and the deployment unimaginative. Veterans Affairs Canada shows how the editing and incorporation of material (using cut-outs and montage, for example) can raise the impact of already striking material.

First published on 11 November, 2004