Book Doc

…to build a better book.
January 21, 2012

mobile-izing

Just tonight I changed my “skin” for this blog to a mobile-friendly one. It feels right.

I had been experimenting with very small windows on my giant iMac 24-inch screen to try to get the feel of a smartphone, and had changed a few of my many webpages to fit, though it’s an entirely different experience.

One of those experiments was to offer scrolling text of three Poe short stories. On the computer, one can hover the mouse to pause the scroll. You can check them out here, here, and here. I don’t know if that pausing technique would work on any or all smartphones—someone might clue me in if they know the answer. HTML5 doesn’t appear to be much different from good ol’ HTML or XHTML; but I don’t know about iOS or that end of technophobia.

The WordPress format seems to echo the common choice for cell phones — big “buttons” for fat fingers, 4 or 5 choices per screen till you get what you want. I see the sense of it. Squeezing images might help but is not as handy as screen-ready material.

I tried an automatic converter, it basically chopped up elements without much choice. As a designer, that’s a no-go.

Much of my own effort is built on my experience in designing layout, typography, spacing, white space in paper books. So, already the Internet “simplifies” my designer choices to banality. One step further, move to the smartphone small screen. What are my options?

PDF serves my purposes just fine, except that’s not a small-screen solution. I’m inclining toward ebooks with links and tags, interactive elements that replace the visual information of layout. My latest project has at least three kinds of text per page, and most pages have paragraph-sized entries, so it’s possible to, say, differentiate by color (wouldn’t work on some devices), perhaps by a small head icon or intro name. Different font? not likely to work on all devices. Different size? Not my preference but possible. Italics? Hairline?

I have to admit that the challenge to design gets me interested, even though it’s like redesigning all over again.

Will this new paradigm hold for at least a few years? I’m suspecting that smartphones will be around for a few years yet. What would replace them, implants? (I hope that’s a joke)

 

 

310 Comments to “mobile-izing”

Leave a Comment