A New Age For Readers
An exploration of iBooks Author and creating an immersive experience for the next generation.
Reading is magical and a little dark…
From a young age I’ve always loved reading, something about escaping this plane of existence to a world where there is mystical beasts, magical beings, hooded archers that gave to the poor while stealing from the rich, evil step sisters that cut off their toes or ankles just to fit the shoe, mermaids that threw themselves off the cliff when rejected to by their “Prince Charming,” and step mothers that danced in red iron shoes for being so cruel to their daughters… That may have taken a dark turn, sorry, my point being, I loved the adventure that a story could take me on.
Making immersive experiences…
As a UX Design student the words immersive and experience have become a large part of our vocabulary.
Personally I’ve always enjoyed paper books and have never made a switch to digital reading. Why read on an illuminated screen when you can get an excitement over turning a page to know what happened next? Digital reading never felt right to me and I could easily be persuaded to stop reading with a simple notification at the top left of my screen.
As a UX Design student were always being challenged to make a new and creative experiences to immerse an audience. Our new experience happened to be, you guessed it, creating an immersive digital book. A fairly new concept to the digital books, I say fairly new because I believe preschool children have had a learning immersive experience for a long time. (Check into any learning/ reading app for children, those guys know how to hold so very active children’s attention.)The book I chose to do, A Series of Unfortunate Events: The Bad Beginning, by: Lemony Snicket aka Daniel Handler. I was ten at the time and the ripe age to read something as manically funny and depressing as the Baudelaire Orphans and their misfortunes.
Gathering and Building Content…
A Series of Unfortunate Events, has a lot of content to choose from. In 2004, it hit the big screens with performances from Jim Carrey, Meryl Streep, young Emily Browning, and a smooth voice over from Jude Law, watch the trailer here. In 2017, it got a bit face lift and became a member of the Netflix Original family; with a golden cast featuring Neil Patrick Harris and Patrick Warburton, watch the trailer here. But since I’m nostalgic and these iconic looks of characters came not only from the mind of Daniel Handler but also the illustration talents of Brett Helquist, I decided to go with a look and feel of an old journal with drawings, a little like a manuscript.
Shall we mood board?
I began working in iBooks Author, having a direction and feel in mind, made it much easier to create content for the book. I enjoyed the beginning of the 2004 Series of Unfortunate Events, trailer that I wanted to keep that typewriter and time feel as well; which helped me create the cover and front page. The series is a dark humored mystery type of book, so having the cover be leathery and mysterious felt fitting to me. It also gave some wiggle room to create more book covers that could carry on a similar mood.
If you haven’t read the series, there is always a letter at the beginning of the book from Lemony Snicket warning the reader of the books contents. With that thought in mind came my first tap-able pop up. My hopeful intent was to create a moment or sense of having a letter fall out of real book, if you have never had this magical moment, I feel for you. There’s always this juncture of excitement from opening a letter that you have no idea what it could be about, even if it passes because it turns out just to be a grocery list that was used as a bookmark.
I also created several other pop-ups that helped readers see characters as they were described with symbols that matched each personality as a que to a pop-up. (A gear for Violet, book for Klaus, and baby rattle for Sunny.)
Working with iBook Author…
iBooks Author was not as great as I wished it to be. I ran into multiple complications while trying to make this book.
One of the issues that I found while using iBook was trying to add multiple animations into one chapter. I only had two animations but only one would work while making the other become a still image. It was discouraging to say the least and try as I may the animation below became a still image in my final project.
It took a lot more planning to for layout as well, going through each page and making sure the leading was correct throughout the book. Spacing was a bit of an issue with me. The images below are from me trying to create the same template for each chapter and how they just would not work with me. I even used the rulers to align the pages to make sure that they would space evenly without creating a jarring experience. It did not go well.
But it was it all bad, I did like how it looked on my iPad Pro. The use of glossary terms, that allowed me to add to the cheekiness of the book and adding unique pop-ups that I imagine could change throughout time and progression of the series, was oppositely easy and functional.
Conclusions…
Even with the multiple headaches, I really enjoyed bringing a book from my childhood to life in the form that I first became entranced by it. I find that reading is truly important when developing a sense of self. If digital books went in this direction that created an immersive experience for readers the possibility of me, and I assume some others, might make the switch from hard copies of books.
Shelly Gardner is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The following article relates to ePub 3.0 in the DGM 2260 and representative of the skills learned.
