Audiobook ReDesign Process

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

This is the audiobook art cover is from the Itunes Store. I felt that it needed a bit more visual design to really showcase what the story may be about.

I selected the Alchemist by Paulo Coelho for this project because it was my favorite book growing up and I really was imersed in the story and world that Santiago (the main character) was involved in.

I designed this cover art in hopes to entice the reader in finding out more about this shephard, and how it correlates with the title of the book, The Alchemist.

It gives this feel of Eastern Europe a couple hundred years ago.

I am not the most experienced illustrator so I resorted to this great image I found on Pixabay.com. When I first saw it, I thought that it fit my vision for this audiobook cover perfectly.

Initially when I added a white text against the clouds it kinda got lost and was hard to read. To fix that issue, I overlayed a gradient effect to washout the clouds and then placed the text over my blue gradient which made it a lot easier to see.

Chapter Art

This awesome font that i’m using is called Luminari.

I also added a drop shadow the the words to give it a bit more pop against the background.

The reason why I chose to divide the book into 4 separate parts is because there are over 40 chapters in this book and they weren’t that long in length. Each part to this series is about an hour long which I thought would be appropriate to listen to. The title text at the top of the cover art is my own wordage that deemed suitable for each section.

Publishing Process

After all the graphics were made, I needed to put it all together. In order to get an Audiobook to edit, I needed to get a DRM free version of the file. DRM stands for Digital Rights Management. The purpose of DRM is to prevent unaurthorized redistribution of digital media. I purchased this DRM free audiobook from Downpour.com. This site made the purchasing process super easy and I was able to pick what type of audio file I wanted, I ended up selecting MP3 for obvious reasons.

Next step was to open Audiobook Builder which is a IOS App that costs $4.99 on the App Store.

Once opened and the audio files are imported. There are a few basic screens that you can navigate back and forth from to edit the meta data.

Screen 1

Here is where I was able to import my Audiobook Cover Art and adjust any metadata for the Title and Author. As for Genre, I just left it alone, since it is an audiobook and no changes needed to be made.

Screen 2

On screen 2, I was able to combine each chapter audio file into larger parts and re-title them with what I seemed appropriate for the section. I mostly used the “join” tool located at the top.

Screen 3

Screen 3 is basically just a overview of what the audiobook with export as and the simple meta data attached to it.

Screen 4

Screen 4 appears when you click “build options…” on screen 3. Here you can choose what type of file format you would like to export as. You can also select how you want to break up the chapters or parts.

Testing Process

I wanted to test out my published audiobook on a few different platforms. Desktop, Mobile and Car (for when I listen to my audiobook as I drive).

After exporting the file, it had already synced itself with Itunes. It showed up in my audiobook folder and was ready to play. The only issue I ran into on Itunes was that my 4 parts werent divided up, or atleast I couldn’t see if they were or not. It just played the 4 hour long audiobook title The Alchemist.

Next we move onto my mobile phone which happened to be the iPhone 7+ so there’s a lot of IOS synergy going on. Side note: its so fascinating how well they have programed these devices to work with each other so effortlessly. Kudos to you Apple!

Here we have a screen shot from my phone, and as expected, everything worked great. This time, the chapter art and different parts were separated and I could choose which part to listen to with the corresponding chapter art that I made to go along with it.

These 4 images are pictures taken of the data my car was able to populate on my dash screen. If you look closely you will notice that it says “01 The Alchemist 1/4” I never entered in this meta data when making the file, the car itself made these adjustments which I thought were intriguing. Not the biggest issue but it still would have been nice to get the data I wanted. Just give me more incentive to research and re-test.

Conclusion

Im happy to be able to show you my process in re-designing a audiobook using the app Audiobook Builder. The app itself was very intuitive and simple to function. It really made the process so much easier than I had imagined. It is a fun little project for any of you that would like to design your own randition of your favorite books!

Reboot Branding is apart of the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to (Audiobook Rebuild Project) in the (DGM 2260 course) and representative of the skills learned.