Opportunities of Liquid Layouts

In taking on the challenges inherent in designing for the iPhone or iPad, I found a new playground for compelling designs and an opportunity to take opportunities that are not offered when designing for print. Instead of allowing the design challenges of this medium to constrain my creative thinking, I sought after a new space beyond our previous horizons. After all, the ability to take large bodies of text, images, time based content, etc., and compress them for viewing on a small, light-weight, portable device is where the future lies.

A Little About The Process :
TOC / Naviagion / Personalization / Image Editing

During the years of Stalin's rule over the Soviet Union, multitudes of of documents were tapped out on typewriters and, copied on the modern printing press, spread across vast regions as propaganda. What media are used to spread information today? I imagined this process of design and proliferation using the iBook/EPUB platform.

In my design, I jumped between InDesign, Adobe Digital Editions, Dreamweaver, and prototyping in on the iPhone. Becaues InDesign, Adobe Digital Editions, and Dreamweaver did not offer me a WYSWYG environment, each of the table of contents, CSS styling of the chapter headers, chapter sections, and subheaders required prototyping to the iPhone.

The images I chose to accompany the text were prints by Kathe Kollwitz. All of the typography beyond the table of contents was forced to American Typewriter using span tags. Although the American Typewriter typeface may be seen as too democratically connected to this content, I think this typeface reflects the spirit of the time when the Communist Manifesto would have been promulgated.