Travel Publication using InDesign & Mag+
Before starting this project I did a little bit of research on what big magazine publications were offering in their digital space and I was surprisingly disappointed. I assumed because we are in a very digital world, that some of the bigger magazine publications would have adapted well. After looking at Times, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, and many other local ones like Costco, etc. I realized that there is a definite need for digital experiences in the print world and I was excited to explore these options.
For this project we used Mag+ and InDesign, which I hadn’t ever used this combination, but was excited to learn. When starting this project I decided I wanted to do a travel publication because I wanted to learn about other places and and I knew that I would have an abundance of high quality photos to choose from. I started out by sketching some of my ideas and what functionality I would want each of the pages to have. I knew that I wanted this to be very visually driven, so I planned out different ways that I could display the pictures.
I then decided that the title of my publication was going to be “Wanderin’ Around Town” and although I think I would do it differently in the future, I decided that each of my articles were going to look distinctly different from each other and they would each have a vibe that I felt went with whatever place they were showcasing. I like this idea and I like how most of the articles turned out, but next time I would do a better job at making the publication look cohesive.
Next I started building out the articles and interactivity. The table of contents looks like a trail, with each of the “stops” being the titles of publications that the user can jump to. Like I mentioned before, each of the destination articles have their own look and feel to make the user feel like they are actually in a different place when they are “wanderin’ around town”. I also tried to mix up the amount of text heavy and image heavy articles. Some have more of a look around/gallery feel, and others are more “travel tips” or information pieces, but they all have fun and vibrant pictures.
Challenges and Overall Thoughts
The biggest challenge in this project was figuring out the somewhat finicky functionality between Mag+ and InDesign. But with the speed bumps of InDesign crashes and the 50/50 chance of inability to test my designs on my iPad included, I enjoyed pushing the limits of these two softwares to create an interactive publication.
Emma Lightfoot is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to the Publication project in the (DGM 2270 Course) and representative of the skills learned.
