Proposal

proposal

Today’s article will be about proposing my Ibook design and feel. This includes the graphic style, the overall experience and the graphical elements. 

graphic styles

There were 6 potential graphics styles that would enhance the coral reef books. After considering the time restraints, having detailed retro styled illustrations was not possible. Dynamic imagery was too intense in terms of black and white for the reef feel. Although the concept of positioning text in geometrical shapes would have been visually pleasing, this might have reduced the legibility of the headings and the front cover tagline. 

The chosen theme is a retro Silhouette design. Silhouette feature flat colours, making them the best graphical elements and style to represent trendy designs. Majority of apps use flat colour to insert clarity to the interface design. 

In addition to this, the retro designed text used in the 1950’s is a unique attribute for a book aimed at level 3 students. There are quite a few artist who have create retro text within circles. Although the style of the text and the illustrations featured are captivating, the shapes could reduce the user experience for read, mentioned above.

usability and user experience

In the pre production stage, there was a realisation that the aim for the Ibook was to provide useful and comprehensive content about the coral reefs. A decision was made to offer many interactive elements that maintains the user’s attention. A glossary will be featured on majority to reduce the mental workflow. 

Keeping the quantity of page to a minimum is another target to achieve. A book with high amount of pages and words prevents them from understanding the overall content, causing them to lose interest. Keeping the word count to an acceptable levels and making sure the book does not reach or go over 30 + pages would be a great achievement.  

The component that will make the Ibook short and sharp is the pop over widget provided on Ibooks Author. This feature allows the design to insert content into a dialogue box and create buttons that appears as a logo or an image. This should allow 2 pages worth of content to be combined onto one page should reduce the number of pages. 

colour and type 

Type is one of the most essential attribute for establishing hierarchy and great user experience. There are primary 3 text that have chosen for many reasons. Bench Mark Nine is a thick display font that features a tall x height, making it look very clean on the screen. The bold aspect enables it to be one of the main focal points. This font is not as thick as a black letter head font. 

The main body consist of the san serif counterpart of Merriweather, Merriweather Sans.  Whilst conducting research in design and technical research, Smashing magazine recommend that its tall x height makes its a great candidate for screen reading. the font  was inserted onto a web app to see whether a paragraph of text would be legible when scale to 16pt.  There was no distortion that affected the kerning or tracking and so on.  The bold variation will be used to present secondary headings, and the italic will be used as captions. 

Lobster 2 is a script face font with a calm characteristics. It features very element curves and there is high weight contrast around the bowls Reefs generally signify calm and nature, this therefore lobster 2 would convey this. This will be presented as a chapter name on top of the page. This will consistently use throughout the book. 

There were many colour schemes that were explored but an analogous colours, blue, and green look the most visually pleasing. Many nature images feature this colour therefore it makes sense to get influence by this. 

Red, orange and white are going to be the colours that will establish hierarchy. Orange and blue are complementary colours, resulting in the orange striking the users' eyes. Applying this colour near a heading would most likely cause the reader to focus on the heading. 

Here are the HEX and RGB colours

Light blue:95B6BB

Dark blue: 3D4E56

Red :681919

Orange:BF631F

White :F2F4E6

A decisions was made to include the tint of orange make text and some graphical elements stand out. This colour compliments both the blue and the green. This colour is great for offering legibility. No texture, shadows and highlights will be applied to ensure the interface offers clarity. 

Navigation and content

Based on my content, there are going to be 4 chapters, overview, famous reefs, tourism, and threats. I decided each chapter should feature a minimum of 3 sections to ensure the reading experience is not too short. 

Due to the problem of students shutting down the software due to the text being text heavy, I will have to make-sure each page features a reasonable amount of content. I am going to attempt to restrict to 2 paragraphs per page.