Revisiting the Alps
My first foray into Mag+ was successful in the regards that I completed what was assigned and the product didn’t crash. Other than that it wasn’t too feature rich, had dummy text, and wasn’t as consistent of an experience as I wanted. You can read about this first time experience here.
Some time has passed and I decided I should revisit this magazine. I love the Alpine region of Germany, Austria and Switzerland and thought I should do the region respect with a more exciting digital magazine experience. Before I could decide what information to include I needed to determine who my exact audience was going to be. I chose to narrow my focus to those who have visited the region a few times and want to relive some of those memories. This meant I could include a little German, and could focus on more local information instead of the typical tourist attractions.
I wanted to make a more compelling experience for my audience than I did on my first try this time it would have informative body copy and would be consistent from start to finish. To reach these goals I needed to start with a plan which meant lots of sketching.
Since I wanted a consistent feel I felt I should start with the article page layouts as those would be the majority of my magazine based on volume of content. I decided to go with a straightforward layout that included features and graphics that didn’t get in the way. For me this included hiding anywhere images met so I covered them up with a horizontal bar to make the images appear to merge as one.
This ended up being such a large element of the page I decided to create the magazine’s look and feel around the seamless images and simple geometric shapes. So with a finalized layout and feel for the magazine I could focus on asset creation.
The majority of the work for this project was gathering assets and creating assets that I could then just plug into InDesign. I was surprised at the level of work that was done outside of InDesign, since for my first two projects with Mag+ I created most assets within InDesign. This old way to work cause me to be sick of Mag+ and InDesign in general very quickly, but creating assets in separate programs allowed me to create exactly what I wanted. Adobe’s Cloud Libraries saved my life swapping assets from Illustrator and Photoshop to InDesign and I learned the benefit of HTML files that are referenced to in Mag+ as I could overright the file with an updated version and not have to change any settings within Mag+
While I was stitching these assets together I had to decide how I wanted multiple popups to work together. On of my pages has three different popups come up with one tap and normally one popup will appear per tap. Instead of creating an entire HTML animation for this, and after researching and discussing with my professor I decided to use a Mag+ feature that creates a chain reaction of popups all grouped together for them to all appear at the same time. I wanted to find a native way to solve this problem instead of going the way that I already knew, and I’m glad I did this because I learned a lot aside from this one feature.
Finally with all the assets and features together I created this magazine:
I learned that a good consistent experience needs to be planned, and tested before ever creating a digital asset. I also learned that doing things the way I know isn’t always the easiest or fastest way, if I research and use my resources I can learn much more than just barreling through a project.
