This was a really interesting part of the course, I learnt a lot.

First off my initial design of my part of the magazine looked like this:

A bit of a mess but it all makes sense I think if you can read my notes in red.

It progressed to this when I did it in ID and added animations (Flash, wrong & a lot of stuff like the price links didn’t work at this point either).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj_3ipYV5n4&list=UULvfwYOykaQqnBmZtz5O1UA

When we got together as a group though we needed to make our designs all fit together so the magazine was coherent, so we went with Fran’s design overall as it was simply much better than the rest of ours; so we went for this kind of style:

On a macro scale I’ve learnt how to create an interactive magazine in InDesign; more specifically though I’ve learnt a lot of ID tricks that are really going to help me regardless of whether I’m making magazines or another design medium.

One of the biggest features I learnt about was multi-state objects – basically a way to change how bits of the document look with interactions; I used a few of these, most effectively employed, I believe, in an interactive button which would make a video pop up (accompanied by an ‘X’ button to close it again). Multi-state objects are pretty easy and pretty great once you get the hang of them.

They are also really a must-know thing, especially if you’re designing for iPads (or any other Apple product really) and want some animation as they DO NOT SUPPORT FLASH.
I had forgotten about this little detail when I started my magazine design so had done everything with swf animations, which I of course had to replace with multi-state objects (which didn’t work quite as well but were sufficient for my plans).

Another thing I felt was very helpful to know was a scrollable text frame. Pretty simple to make once you know how but it did take me a while to get to that stage with this one as the tutorials I had looked at were worded less than clearly. But now I know and they are great.

Apart from struggling a bit with those I grasped everything else pretty well I think, despite never having done this before, to the point where I was helping other members of my group (and I was of course happy to do so). I don’t mean to sound braggy, I just like that I can understand more ‘technical’ aspects of design rather quickly.

All in all, it turned out pretty well, here’s a little video which demonstrates all the interactivity I put into it (this was recorded about halfway through when we hadn’t finished it all, but it shows pretty much all of what I did – the ‘article’ with the woks).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZt5K7zPG98&feature=youtu.be