ICON: For iPhone and iPod touch both of these sizes are required:
57 x 57 pixels
114 x 114 pixels (high resolution)
For iPad, both of these sizes are required:
72 x 72 pixels
144 x 144 (high resolution)
DISPLAY:
For standard iPhone 4 and iPod touch devices:
320 x 480 pixels
640 x 960 pixels (high resolution)
For apps that run on iPhone 5 and iPod touch (5th generation),
create a launch image that measures
640 x 1136 pixels.
For iPad launch images, do not include the status bar region. Create launch images of these sizes (most iPad apps should supply a launch image for each orientation):
1. Don’t Begin Wireframes or Designs Without a Flowmap
Have a well-thought-out user flow ready to go before wireframes and designs begin. Even simple applications should have a well-considered flowmap in place to help ensure a logical and reasonable navigational structure.
Another thing to pay attention to is making sure that key functional screens are close to the top rather than buried beneath multiple levels of navigational elements. Skipping the flowmap and simply designing or wiring screens without a plan is the easiest way to create a convoluted flow that leaves users confused and turned off.
The National Design Awards program celebrates design as a vital humanistic tool in shaping the world, and seeks to increase national awareness of design by educating the public and promoting excellence, innovation, and lasting achievement.
Spurred by the dance between his curiosity and ignorance, Richard Saul Wurman, FAIA, seeks ways to make the complex clear. Described by Fortune magazine as an “intellectual hedonist” with a “hummingbird mind,” he has written, designed, and published eighty-three books (and counting) on topics ranging from healthcare to atlases and the Olympics. He reinvented the guidebook in 1980 with the ACCESS series. Wurman received his degrees in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania and originated the term “information architecture.” Wurman created and chaired the TED, TEDMED, and EG conferences in 1984–2002, 1995–2010, and 2006, respectively. In 2012, he developed the WWW conferences celebrating improvised conversations, or “intellectual jazz,” and continues to work on his global cartographic initiative, 19.20.21. Wurman will receive the Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse by Trinity College Dublin in October 2012.
Janine Benyus is a biologist, innovation consultant, and author of six books, includingBiomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. In 1998, Benyus cofounded Biomimicry Guild, the world’s first bio‐inspired consultancy, bringing nature’s sustainable designs to over 250 clients, including Boeing, Nike, General Electric, Herman Miller, HOK, IDEO, Interface, and Proctor & Gamble. In 2006, Benyus cofounded Biomimicry Institute, home of AskNature, an online library of life’s best ideas. In 2011, she launched Biomimicry 3.8 to certify and nurture the growing network of biomimicry professionals. Benyus has received numerous awards, including the 2011 Heinz Award, and was TIME’s International 2007 Hero of the Environment.
Corporate & Institutional Achievement: Design that Matters
Conceived by graduate students at the MIT Media Lab in 2001, Design that Matters is a nonprofit design company that partners with social entrepreneurs to design products that address basic needs in developing countries. Led by cofounder Timothy Prestero, over 850 academic and professional collaborators have worked together to create dozens of product concepts, including a projector for nighttime adult literacy education in Africa, a low cost neonatal incubator using spare car parts, and, most recently, a phototherapy device for treating newborn jaundice in Vietnam. Design that Matters has captured the public’s attention through its award-winning creations and innovative, human‐centered approach to product design.
Mack Scogin and Merrill Elam have worked together in architecture for over forty years. Founded in 1984, their Atlanta-based firm, Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, has won international acclaim for work that ranges from a sleek factory for Herman Miller to the Lulu Chow Wang Campus Center for Wellesley College and commercial office space for Tishman Speyer Properties. The firm’s diverse body of work is uniquely characterized by profound rigor tempered by childlike innocence. Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects has been recognized with numerous awards and publications and their work has been shown at museums such as The Museum of Modern Art and The Walker Art Center.
Thom Browne’s meticulous aesthetic is rooted in an American sensibility evocative of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Browne opened his doors in the fall of 2001, offering bespoke tailored clothing; he introduced ready-to-wear menswear in 2004 and womenswear in 2010. He designs the Black Fleece by Brooks Brothers collection for men and women as well as a line of men’s jewelry for Harry Winston. In 2009, Browne introduced the Moncler Gamme Bleu collection. He was named Menswear Designer of the Year in 2006 by the CFDA, Designer of the Year in 2008 by GQ magazine, and Most Influential Designer—Menswear in 2010 by WGSN.
Evan Roth is an interaction designer who visualizes, records, and subverts transient, often unseen moments in public spaces, in popular culture, and on the Internet. His approach takes inspiration from the free software movement and hacker ethos, leading to such notable pieces as Laser Tag, White Glove Tracking, Eyewriter, and a collaboration with Jay-Z on the first open-source rap video. Roth is cofounder of the Graffiti Research Lab and the Web-based, open-source Free Art & Technology Lab. His work is in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art and has received numerous awards, including the Design Museum London’s Design of the Year.
Clive Wilkinson Architects is a distinguished architecture and design practice based in Los Angeles, which collaborates with clients to design and build creative communities. The practice has completed creative projects across the globe for clients such as Google, Nokia, Twentieth Century Fox, and Disney, winning over seventy-five awards in the process. In its work, the firm strives to connect people, shape relationships, and empower organizations to produce invigorating forms of community. Clive Wilkinson was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame and has been named a Master of Design by Fast Company magazine and a Pioneer of Design by the IIDA.
Stoss Landscape Urbanism is a Boston-based collaborative design and planning studio that operates at the juncture of landscape architecture, urban design, and planning. The firm was established in 2000 by Founding Principal Chris Reed; Scott Bishop joined as Associate Principal in 2005. Stoss has distinguished itself by utilizing a hybridized approach rooted in infrastructure, functionality, and ecology. The firm’s projects include The CityDeck in Green Bay, Erie Street Plaza in Milwaukee, The Plaza at Harvard University in Cambridge, and Bass River Park on Cape Cod. In 2010, Stoss became the first North American firm to win the Topos Landscape Award.
Scott Wilson is the Founder and Principal Designer of the Chicago-based studio, MINIMAL. A former design leader at Nike, Thomson Consumer Electronics, IDEO, Fortune Brands, and Motorola, he has created some of the world’s most recognized consumer design icons, including MINIMAL's collaboration with Microsoft on Kinect for Xbox 360 and TikTok and LunaTik watches for the iPod Nano. Equal parts visionary and entrepreneur, Scott Wilson delivers disruptive yet thoughtful solutions to markets across a range of industries. His work has been recognized with over fifty international design awards and has been exhibited at Cooper-Hewitt, The Museum of Modern Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Red Burns is an arts professor and chief collaborations officer for the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She founded the department in 1979 as the Alternate Media Center, and until 2010 served as ITP chair. During the 1970s, she designed and directed a series of projects including a a CD-ROM on chaos theory and a two-way television for and by senior citizens—one of the first Teletext field trials in the United States. Burns has been recognized with numerous awards and honors including a Webby Special Achievement Award in 2011, a Lifetime Achievement Award from Canadian New Media in 2009, and the Mayor of New York’s Award for Excellence in Science and Technology in 1998.
The invention of the tablet PC has created a new medium for book publishing. Interactive books are everywhere, and have revolutionized the way people consume the printed word. With the recent software available to allow easy creation of interactive books and with the race to bring these products to market, there seems to be a more and more dilution of quality and a loss for the meaning of interactivity. When publishers create new eBook titles or convert a traditional printed book to a digital interactive eBook, they often miss the added value this new medium can provide.
It’s important to understand the distinction between apps and eBooks, as it's something that often confuses both publishers and consumers. It basically comes down to formats; apps are mostly native iOS orAndroidsoftware, whereas eBooks are documents of a particular format, such as the open standards EPUB and Mobipocket (.mobi). And eBooks can be further distinguished from “enhanced eBooks,” which use formats such as ePUB3 for iBooks (Apple) and Kindle Format 8 (KF8) for Kindle Fire (Amazon).
eBooks were the first to appear on devices such as the Kindle, and have very limited interactivity. You are mainly able to flip the pages, search for content, or highlight words to see a dictionary definition. These devices also allowed font size to be increased to enable visually impaired readers enjoy books more easily. This gave publishers the unforeseen benefit of regaining a large population of users who couldn’t read printed books.
Enhanced eBooks (ePUB3) are a new digital publication standard that allows easy integration of video, audio, and interactivity. I expect this format to advance the future of textbooks and other educational material. Future textbooks might be able to "read themselves" with audio narration, perhaps preventing students from actually reading. But the benefits outweigh the downsides; for example, the new text books might also offer the ability to make and share annotations without destroying the book, interactive self-tests throughout the chapters, and generally a much more enjoyable learning experience.
Apple has recently released iBooks Author, a free eBook creation software that lets anyone with a Mac to create iBooks textbooks, cookbooks, history books, picture books, etc. iBooks Author generates a proprietary format for books that will only be available for sale on Apple devices. Adobe has also made available a Digital Publishing Suite via InDesign for the iPad, Android, and Blackberry platforms. Mag+ and Moglue are two other independent publishing platforms that are worth mentioning.
This video was released by Apple to promote the iBooks Author:
Interactive eBooks is a category for apps designed specifically to utilize the powers of tablets to enable users to interact with the storyline in sight, sound, and touch. I like to think of interactive eBooks as an evolution of the printed book with added interactivity in order to create an experience beyond the printed format. Examples of interactive eBooks include pop-up book apps for kids, interactive travel guides that utilize the device GPS capabilities, cookbooks with built-in timers and video recipes, or any traditional book that now uses the tablet to enhance the experience with interactivity.
Grimm's Rapunzel ~ 3D Interactive Pop-up Book
On a touch device, interactivity is the ability to engage with the user interface, including the ways you move your fingers on the screen, the way you to select an app, or how you browse the Web. Interactive eBooks are, by definition, an enhanced book-like experience that have a different core premise than other types of apps (with the exception of games perhaps). Whereas in most applications, interactivity focuses on menu navigation and interaction with the user interface as means to achieve a goal (view an image, find an address, read an email), interactive eBooks provide interaction with the content and storyline, and therefore offer a unique experience each time. A good example of is Richard Dawkins’ The Magic of Reality, where you interact with the storyline through interactive demonstrations and games that allow you to get hands-on with the science discussed in the book by, for example, letting you simulate the effects of heat, pressure, and gravity on different states of matter.
The experience of interactive eBooks should not be confined to animations based on touch-and-response interaction, or merely flipping the page; when designing these Books one must ask what is the enhancedexperience—why to move from print to digital, and how to create value and fun.
Interactivity for the Sake of Interactivity
If a book app does not use interactivity in order to enhance the reading experience, it does not belong in the interactive eBook category. In the race to bring interactive books to market, some of the books have only featured very superficial interactivity—what I call “interactivity for the sake of interactivity”—where, for example, touching an image activates a simple animation such as making a butterfly fly, or a tree drop leaves to the ground. These interactive experiences do not add value to the story, and are therefore somewhat meaningless.
There are a few exceptions where this type of interactivity is actually a success. For example. one of the first books published as an interactive app for the iPad was Alice in Wonderland. This book was a phenomenal success though offered nothing but eye-candy interactivity. When the app was first published, the reviews called it "a reinvention of reading” that made clever use of the accelerometer to make Alice grow as big as a house or to throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts and watch them bounce. Although these activities through the 52 pages of the book are fun, I think they distract from the actual story. The reason this book was such a success is due its having been published when the iPad was fairly new, and touch interactivity was still an exciting experience.
Another book that was fairly successful at the time was The Pedlar Lady of Gushing Cross, which offers narrated animation with very basic interactivity, but was considered revolutionary when it came out because reading the story while seeing the animation unfold was definitely an enhanced experience to the young reader. However, this book did not offer any real value through interactivity, and might as well be classified as a short animated movie. The limited interactivity of seeing letters animate while you tilt the device was merely a gimmick, as you can see in the video below
Cozmo's Day Off is an interactive eBook that was on the top-seller list for many months, and is packed with interactive elements that made it a great success. It contains over 100 unique audio and animated interactions. However, this app would be better characterized as a game for young kids and not as an interactive storybook because the story seems secondary to all the bells and whistles, and it’s written in style not intended for young audiences. But perhaps this is a case where interaction simply for the sake of interaction can be the whole point of a book.
The image below shows all of the hotspots that trigger an animation sequence for one page of the book:
Interaction for Value
It is possible for interactivity to go beyond the superficial, to add value to the book and create an experience that would be impossible in print. Here are a few examples of such cases.
Al Gore's Our Choice is a great example of how meaningful interactivity creates an engaging and fun learning experience. With clever use of interactive infographics, animations, documentary videos, and images, this book is a great example of what the future has in store for digital publishing.
The Martha Stewart Cookies iPad app is a wonderful example of an interactive recipe book. Besides just offering great recipes, it also allows you to search recipes based on ingredients and cookie type to find the perfect cookie for your needs. For example, you might use the app’s search wheel (below) to look for bars and biscotti-type cookies with oatmeal as the main flavor component. This is a great added value because this type of interaction is unmatched in print.
Paris: DK Eyewitness is probably the most complete travel guide you can find for the iPad. It features beautiful cutaways of buildings that can be explored by tapping and zooming, complete offline maps for all the central districts of the city, interactive city and park walks with “hotspots,” and extensive listings of the best sights relative to your current location. No more searching aimlessly for your location on a map or looking through index pages; the interactive app shows what's around you within walking distance, making the iPad a must-carry on in your travel bag for an experience unparalleled in a traditional travel guides.
Bobo Explores Light is an educational experience for young adults. It puts a fully functional science museum in the palm of your hand, teaching you about lasers, telescopes, lightning, reflection, bioluminescence, and sunlight. This is great example of using simple interactivity to explain relatively complex topics through science experiments that you can actually perform on your iPad. Bobo, a friendly robot, serves as a guide, taking the young reader through space, land, and sea, to learn all about the science of light.
In my book, Timor the Alligator, kids participate in the story by picking toothpaste and helping Timor brush his teeth. This story could not have been told in a printed book because, without the use of interactivity, young kids would not be able to visually understand that brushing actually helps keep a clean mouth. The simple process of choosing a toothbrush, adding toothpaste, and brushing Timor’s teeth until they turn white serves as an educational experience for preschoolers and toddlers reading the book.
With the Numberlys app, kids (and adults) learn about the alphabet through a series of fun interactive games. This book probably has the most spectacular visuals I’ve seen to date. Its aesthetic is inspired by Fritz Lang’s silent film, Metropolis, so the app offers a unique cinematic experience and gameplay to engage users to learn about the (fictitious) "origin of the alphabet."
As you can see from these examples, interactive eBooks are no longer just about a touch-to-animate type of interactivity, nor simply the touch interface controls. Rather, they are about adding value through interactivity by using the full capabilities of a touch device to engage the user and enhance the learning and reading experience. These engaging experiences are what I call a true reinvention of reading.
If typography were a religion, this would be the Bible. FontBook is the world’s most comprehensive typographic reference tool, containing 110 type foundries and featuring over 620,000 typeface specimens. Use the FontBook app to look up and view fonts by name, style category, typographical subclassification, designer name, foundry name, year of publication, or by similarity of design. Compile your own list of favorite fonts, and use the “compare” tool to test-drive fonts. Specially designed for fast, easy navigation and also works as a fun playground for finding inspiration.
FontBook is primarily an online browsing application and displays its full content only when your device has internet access through a WiFi or 3G mobile connection. However, if you have no online access, you can temporarily switch the “Include online content” setting to “off”. This will enable the app to display a reduced pool of selected content which will work offline. Whenever you do have online access, you can switch back to the full version by switching the “Include online content” setting to “on”.
Learn More:
See FAQs and further reading at the FontShop Blog, plus tutorials and background at The FontFeed.
Buy App:
It’s available now for only $5.99/€4.99 from the iTunes App Store. Get it!
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