Photosynthesis With iBooks author

How my team and I made an original Photosynthesis interactive iBook

For the sake of sanity, I'm going to be using snapshots of our shared file that we used for documentation.

When starting this project we had no idea what we wanted to do. Several ideas were thrown around then one morning it hit me in the face. All of the other projects are one of five (movie, book, band, game travel). What is different… Photosynthesis. Its been years last we ever thought or talked about this subject so we had a lot of research to be done.

Research

We looked at a lot of videos and charts trying to get both the big picture and in-depth of what photosynthesis is. This was one of the longest and most frustrating parts of the project. We had stacks and stack of information and nothing to do with it.

Demographic

This one is kind of sad. We did a bit of thinking on this one but not much more. Younger students with lots of green is what we gathered.

One thing we did discuss in length but never wrote down is that we want to make a book that is educational and not boring. So we wanted good graphics and some way of making it more of a process of discovery than being shovel fed information.

Storyboarding and Prototyping

After information gathering, we spent the rest of our time in this process.

We did a lot of sketches and two different paper prototypes. This process is what kicked us off and made making the actual book so much easier and faster. Another side of this is we found areas we are lacking information also how we want to present that information.

More knowledge!

What are the parts of a cell, how much should we talk about them what does a leaf look like? Define Define Define. Like I said we spent a lot of time learning what we know and what we have to offer on this topic.

Graphics and the Book

The three of us have different skills. I have a better graphic history than both of them and they had better animation and information handling. This part was both fun and easy for me because of all the storyboarding and information we had.

So I made all of the graphics placed them in the right order and left the rest to them.

Conclusion

I can't explain how much you need to know what you're doing. I mean this as in subject matter and end goals. The information and storyboarding are the two biggest processes we spent the most time on and the only processes that made it feel like we had the ability to make this book. So far I'm so very happy we did this topic and did all original work.