M E T A D A T A
This is an inside look into my thought process throughout a type of project I have never done before. The project was to take and audiobook and dive into the metadata. The purpose was to enhance the design of the artwork as well as provide more info such as descriptions and titles.
Why B L I N K ?
I decided on the audio book Blink for two reasons, 1) I have been wanting to listen to the book for awhile now 2) the cover art needed some help in my opinion, no offense to Malcolm Gladwell.
He is so smart, so talented and I love the way he sees the world… One thing he maybe lacks in, that he makes up for in so many other areas, is the aesthetic side of his work. This is also exhibited on his blog shown below.
He gets away with it just fine because his content is so intriguing but enhancing the design would draw in an even bigger group of people.
Inspiration
I seek inspiration from a lot of different things but one of my favorites is pinterest. I will make an idea board and pin up all of my ideas. What I love about Pinterest is I will pin bits of inspiration from different pieces of art that I run into. Those little bits of inspiration lead me to more inspiration that is beyond what I come up with on my own. As I do this, I feel like I am more able to think outside of the box and see beyond my own ideas.
From this inspiration board, I will usually incorporate more than one of the ideas that intrigue me.
THE A R T PART
My design process usually takes lots of drafts, lots of do-overs, and many different ideas. Every once in awhile I will like the first one that comes… Even when that happens though I still like to come up with many different designs to see if I still like idea number one.
This cover happened to be one of those rare occasions. I sort of liked my initial idea but had a couple things I had to play around with.
First I wanted it to have lots of lines, it made me think of blinking. Then I started thinking about the focus of the book, which is how we have these habits we do so often, it becomes unconscious acts (like blinking). We don’t think, we just do. I decided all of the lines on the page made me think a little more than I needed.
FINAL C O V E R
I decided on one stripe above the authors name and added some dimension to the title with a very slight drop shadow. I added detail to the eye to make it more realistic. I decided that this book is not referring to any symbolic meaning of the eye. My goal was to keep the simplicity of the original cover but add a little bit of personality from the book.
CHAPTER A R T
When I was coming up with the chapter artwork I was thinking I wanted to create the illusion of a blinking eye. It was the beginning of a thought when I presented my drafts of my cover to my class and my professor threw the idea out that it would be cool to incorporate a blinking eye. This confirmed the need to carry out this idea.
I originally had the number itself for the chapter names on the artwork. However, as I got some outside opinions, I decided the numeric word filled out the black bar that seemed so bare with just a single number.
T E S T I N G
I am aware testing was meant to be the hardest part of this whole project and it was to say the least. I exported this book so many times and it still doesn’t seem to come out the way I want.
The metadata seemed to show up different with each attempt and on each device. One aspect of the metadata that I felt I had control over that I was able to change was the chapter titles. I first thought it would be good to have the chapter number included in each title but after I received feedback, I realized it was a little redundant having the chapter number in the artwork as well as the title. When I eliminated that part of the title,(as shown in the image below) it was easier to read and it was more likely to show up on the page no matter the device.
I wasn’t able to grab screen captures of a lot of my testing methods because I am a loyal iOS user, so the other methods I used to test my audio book on weren’t mine.
First I tested it on my own computer. It transferred over pretty nice. As far as the metadata goes, iTunes took all my chapter art and used my cover art for every thumbnail. I had to manually go in and change each one of the chapter artworks to the one I wanted. Also the description, found in the audiobook info, was cut short. I had to modify the length of the description
Next I tested it on my mobile iPhone followed by my iPad. Everthing looked pretty good except I again had some issues with the artwork. Also, I wasn’t able to find a lot of the metadata within these audio files once it was on my mobile device. I don’t know if it isn’t available or it is an easy find that I wasn’t able to figure out.
I also tried it out on the android phone which turned out a lot different than the iPhone. the artwork showed up behind the text as a background image. It cropped a lot of the image out of the screen which defeated the purpose of the square design for the artwork. If you click on the artwork it will pull up a popup that fits the screen and isn’t cropped.
TO SUM I T U P…
This was a good project to get a feel for these audio files and how they work. It takes a lot of unanticipated time to work through all of the hiccups that show up as the files are being exported. Something unexpected always happens to the metadata. If it isn’t the description or the titles it is the artwork. However, I think these are the frusterations we signed up for entering into the realm of tech.
- Chloe Ferre is a student in the Web Design and Development with an emphasis on interaction and design program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the audiobook project in the DGM 2260 Immersive Authoring Course and is a representative of the skills learned.
