2017

General design approach
Before you start designing anything, you should know as much as possible about the
answers to the questions asked earlier in this document. The features and limitations
of the format(s), operating system(s), and device(s) you're targeting may severely limit
your choices when it comes to design. If you feel like you already have a good
understanding of what you want to create, here are some suggestions on how to
approach creating it.
• Decide upon a general approach. Avoid reinventing the wheel. Try to find an
app/reader that looks and works the way you want it to, then think about what
it is that you like about it and how you might improve on it.
• Decide how you want the UI to work. Make sure the UI feels natural. In other
words, make sure the design makes affordances for the UI, rather than just
imposing an arbitrary UI on every page.
• Decide what kind of layout you want. A standard way to do an eBook is to
simply mimic the experience of reading a physical book, with pages that you can
turn. However, this isn't the only way to lay out an eBook. For example, you can
present a horizontal line of thumbnails, each of which represents an article, with
a scrollable vertical list of page thumbnails underneath each (this is called a "page
stack"). In full-page view, a page-stack design lets the user swipe horizontally to
browse through articles and vertically to read them.
16 | DIGITAL PUBLISHING WITH QUARKXPRESS 2017
GENERAL DESIGN APPROACH