Interactive Magazine

Week 2 – Research and Development

Now we have the idea for a food related magazine I have been researching the styles of web pages within this category.

http://studentrecipes.com/

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With a quirky design and the use of more hand written fonts studentrecipes.com provides for the younger market. Although, as a webpage and not an interactive magazine the site doesn’t interact with the audience as the brief requires. But we can take the key areas and transform them into something to engage with.

 

https://www.studential.com/university/student-cooking

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Alternatively, studential uses a more plain look and empty feel with the overall design. Yet again lacking much interaction.

Now the aim is to design and develop our app with each of us having a specific section to create, for me the recipes. As a group we’ve decided on three recipes:

Starter – Potato skins

Main – Fajitas

Desert – No bake chocolate cake

 

Concepts, Designs and Outcome.

Early Development for the main screen of which the user would either tap or swipe the section they wish to view. Where they would be in control of the transition to the next / chosen page.

flat_apple_devices_mockup_by_michal_jakobsze

 

This first concept is what I’d call a mess, you cant even read the titles on each tile. So the idea of using a menu before each recipe was scrapped and development on the core instructions took place as seen below with the final pages.

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In the end I decided to go with three pages which your automatically presented from the from cover as the first article. As you can see next to the ingredients I placed a trolley logo with the intention that it will open up the sainsburys shopping page allowing you to add the ingredients needed for the recipe. As for the three different colour schemes for each page I opted for pallets which related to the product being made.

During group discussions we came up with quite a list of conceptual ideas which we don’t have time or the knowledge to create, below is a few:

  • Built in Java timer for cooking along with the app
  • Notes tab
  • Flip over screen with gesture control
  • Video Content / Cook along tutorials
  • Pinch to zoom in
  • multiple fingers to skip over pages
  • Vegetarian options (buttons were placed but not configured)

All of these would vastly improve the interactivity with the final product which is demonstrated below in a short clip.

 

Week 1 – Brief 1, Interactive Magazine Development

For my first brief I’ve being assigned the task along with 4 others to research and create a new interactive magazine primarily for the iPad. Initially I was introduced to software I previously learn with the addition of new features and techniques I didn’t know existed.

After being given an iPad with multiple examples on such as:

CBeebies                                    Empire                                    WIRED

CBED_l   2 3

 

From the apps I looked at as examples WIRED was by far the most advance and dramatically interactive with multiple flip out menus and extended paged which are optimised and run smoothely unlike others.

And was told to analyse them, focusing on the visual elements which engaged and let the audience interact rather than the simple process of turning a single page. Although, these features are new to the magazine world it seems like they’re the way forward. Not only does it mean audiences get to interact with the articles but they can learn more in a smaller area.

Our task now is to collaborate with the team to create our own magazine which will then be tested on iPad for functionality and interactivity.  With our research done out of class we came up with the idea to create a student cook book styled concept.