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Table Of Contents
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 e-book 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 e-book. 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.
DIGITAL PUBLISHING WITH QUARKXPRESS 9 | 13
GENERAL DESIGN APPROACH