Interactive book

For this project we are making a factual interactive book on any topic that we are passionate about. After a lot of thinking I have decided to make it about European cities, in the future I would love to visit as many as possible. Obviously I cannot use every city otherwise the book will be too long but I was thinking about including some of the ones I have previously been to or a couple that I would love to visit.

List of cities I would like to include:

London
Amsterdam
Carcassonne
Malaga

I have decided that the title for my interactive book will be 'European Favourites', I thought that using quite a plain and simple title so it just skips straight to the point and the audience have a clear understanding of what the book is about.

I think this book is different to others because it is quite personal to me, for example it will mainly include my opinions of the cities that I have been to and that I have liked unlike some other factual books. The reason I would like to create an opinionated book is because I do not have much knowledge on many different European cities, plus if I were to include every single city then the book would be way too long and it would take me a long time to make and considering the time frame we have I would prefer to just stick to what I know. I would like to dedicate a section of the book to inter-railing, this has become extremely popular recently and it is something I would love to do in the future so including this can allow other people that are interested in the same sort of thing to understand it in more detail.

I am targeting this book at people who are interested in travelling, possibly people who have been travelling before and have seen a lot of the world already as well as people who are hoping to go travelling in the future, they could read the book for a bit of advice and further knowledge of the cities. The target audience can be a quite large, travelling can be appealing to a variety of different people, indecently, couples, friendship groups and families. However it will mainly be people over the age of 18 reading the book so I have to be as formal as possible to make sure the book doesn't come across formal.

Social media is massively popular in this day and age and I believe is perfect for promoting almost anything therefore I would like to take advantage of that and try to get the book promoted on as many social media platforms possible, for example facebook, twitter, snapchat etc. As well as this I have been thinking of other ways to advertise the book that has a specific relevance to travel literature therefore I thought of making some sort of poster and using it in a travelling agency.

Competitors 

I found this book online, it gives a taster of 101 cities around Europe. This book is perfect for people who want factual information about a variety of places to visit in Europe. Personally I believe mine is different to this purely because of the opinions I will be including rather than pure factual information. 

Here is another, personally I prefer this one because it has more of an alternative feel to it unlike the one I looked at before, I would say that this one is targeted more at teenagers and young adults, also it doesn't include as many places, just some of the more popular cities in Europe. 

My project: 
I have been using InDesign to create my interactive book, trial and error has played a massive part of the process so far. I began to consider what background colour I would like to use, firstly I started off with a black background with white text however I thought that looked too plain and boring, I still wanted to have a darker background with lighter text therefore I went for a dark blue colour with slightly pink and grey. Considering I do not have a specific gender target audience these colours are appropriate.

I like the idea of having a picture on one side the page and the text on the other so it give the book more of a structure and I believe it looks more professional however for the first page I have used centre text considering I am not using a picture, it gives all of the focus to the text on the page. The images I have used are free to use or share, even commercially.

Firstly I have included a page about inter-railing, because I have not been inter-railing before I cannot write about my experience therefore I have researched factual information and written down key facts that I believe someone would like to know if they were considering it.

The first city in the booklet is Amsterdam, I began by giving some facts about the city and then I started to talk about why I love it so much and why I would recommend it. Secondly I have included a section on London and I have structured it in the same sort of way as the previous city for example, factual information about the city, why I like it so much, followed by some more factual information. I have then done a similar layout with the next two cities, Malaga and Carcassonne.

I would like the theme of my book to stay consistent throughout and that is why I have the same layout on each page that includes the information and the cities.

I wanted to design the front cover after designing the inside pages because I wanted to experiment with layouts and themes. I have stuck to the theme and allowed an image to go on the left of the page with the text on the right. The front cover is quite simple but using a picture of a globe with Europe highlighted is a clear representation of the subject of the interactive book.  I have also continued to use the same colours and fonts. 

I have looked over the work I have produced and made adjustments to make the e-book look more proffessional and tidy. Firstly, I lined up all of the text and images so they are placed identically on each page, after that I re-read all of the text and altered any mistakes. When I spoke to my teacher he mentioned that he liked the idea of my my book and the overall turnout of the pages but he suggested that I could change up the pages to make add something extra to the pages therefore I swapped the position of the image and text on each page.

Animation

After I polished each page of the book, I then began to create my animation. Originaly I liked the idea of having a symbol of each city on each page, I could've animated them hovering onto the page however after sketching out some ideas I realised that it could distract from the text. I opened up flash and intserted the image of the map used on my front cover, I was using trial and error in flash because I still find it a very difficult software to use and I didn't want to go over the top with the animation because I didn't want it to interfere with the the main aspects of the book. I used the rotation tool and just repeated that motion, considering I was just rotating a 2D image I couldn't use the animation to show the map on the globe therefore it is spinning in a circulur motion. I have create arrows on each page which allow the reader to click on them to reach the next page of the book.