A Different Kind of Photo Look Book
Come take a virtual–interactive tour of my work
Most look books portray a very simple style with full page images that a viewer can browse through to see the work of a photographer. I love the simplicity of that style, however, I wanted to create an experience that would be memorable for my clients. And most of all I wanted them to be able to see how my work might apply to them in their personal spaces, whether that be family photographs or commercial. For this publication, I decided to create a virtual tour through a home space and an art gallery for my photography website found here.
My Process
To begin, I created some sketches of how I wanted to portray my images and the flow of how I wanted the viewer to move through the scenes.
Rather than just a static image of a scene, I wanted the viewer to feel as if they were moving down the hallways, slowly being introduced to images displayed on walls. I wanted them to be able to move in and out of rooms as if they are going on a real home tour and see how my images enhanced the beauty of the rooms they were in.
The medium that I was using to create my publication was Mag +. I quickly started running into some design issues on how to make my design ideas work within this application. Mag + is a great tool for building interactive content, however, my panning idea of gliding through the halls, going inside of rooms and being able to tap on images to enlarge them didn’t all work together within that application.
After brainstorming with my teacher in my digital publication college class, we were able to come up with a solution of creating my scenes as an HTML. The HTML would work in Mag+ to tell it to open the popups placed inside of mag+. It was a much simpler solution.
Designing
This proved to be the most time consuming aspect of the project. Not only was I throwing up colors, fonts and trying to weed through thousands of images to display, I also had to design a home. Many scenes are created starting from scratch, from the walls and floors, furniture, decor, plants and of course the pictures added to the walls as the final touch.
After the scenes were built, I then took them into Tumult Hype to animate the panning motion which would allow the viewer to scroll through the halls. I then added invisible objects over each image and coded them to interact with mag+ to open each image into a larger view.
Conclusion
Creating this project tested my design skills by trying to implement a user experience to feel as natural as possible and do it in a way that would be seamless to the viewer. I had to think outside the box of just using one application to build my design. With the work of Photoshop, HTML objects and Mag+, my vision came together, not 100% perfect, but it was something to be proud of and it gave the experience I was hoping for.
View a demo of my project here:
