Foxhole Format

A website documenting the creation and execution of a class on advanced ePublishing at Emerson College. I will use this site to upload images and text on the reasons for assignments and course structure as well as examples from class.

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Choose Your Own Class

The last class in April, and the last structured class of the semester (the final classes were dedicated to the students’ final projects), was focused on how to create interactive text adventures.

I had the students work through three different models of creating interactive text adventures: They mapped it out in MS Excel, used Twine to create an HTML version and then designed one using links and buttons in InDesign.

The instructions for the class can be found here: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/Spring2015/interactivetextlab.html

Here’s my sample Excel file: http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/lastclass.xls

and the epub I created in InDesign:  http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/sundaynight.epub

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A fun little EPUB of Farm Animals

Here’s an EPUB we made in class that took 4 images of animals and used the button options in InDesign to make it so that the images would make a sound when you touched them. It’s a fun little EPUB that mimics all those children’s books with the sounds on top.

http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/animals.epub

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Class on Wednesday

Even before the madness that was winter in New England, Emerson has to reschedule some of the Monday night classes due to the large number of holidays that fall on Monday. The school was closed on Monday the 21st for Patriots Day, a state holiday, but in Emerson-land we followed a Monday schedule on this Wednesday. The class was focused on adding audio and video components to an EPUB.

I started the class with a short exercise on using audacity to tag a large audio file for use with SMIL which creates a read-along option in EPUB: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/Spring2015/audacitylab.html

After we did a little work on the audio, the students dug into creating EPUBs in InDesign that used audio and video elements:

http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/Spring2015/soundandvision.html

My version of the final files with read-along can be downloaded from http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/polinka4.epub

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When talking about adding audio and video to a book, who better to guide the way than Bowie?

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Working with Images

On April 13th I had the students in the class work with images in EPUB. This included adding the same image that had been saved in different formats and pixels-per-inch to see the difference in rendering (there isn’t much about 150 ppi).

I also had the students create and animated gif and add it to the InDesign File. They also had to create the same animation using CSS3.

Before the lab we watched  The Creative Spark: Stacey Williams-Ng, Interactive Book Designer, a video on Lynda.com on the creation of children’s books for apps.

The lab work can be found here: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/spring2015/EPUBimages.html

And the ebook that shows what I wanted them to create is here: http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/image2.epub

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Unused header for calendar assignments. Sorry, Geddy.

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More on emoji and books

When we were creating EPUBs with emoji I wanted to show a book that was done with emojis. I could not find one. The closest thing I found was Bing Xu’s Book from the Ground from MIT Press. The book uses symbols that are meant to transcend the different languages.

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Epub and Emoji

Oh, did I mention I had my students use emojis within EPUB?

I did.

We used Graphemica’s list to add the unicode in the HTML files. 👏

The downside to emoji is that Apple currently limits the size of all emoji so you can not scale them along with the rest of the text. Also emoji are proprietary so the images would look different depending on the operating system.

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Creating Slide shows and Typography

The first lab of April was focused on playing with different typographic treatments and finishing up work on adding JavaScript into EPUBs made in InDesign.

The entire lab can be found here:

http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/Spring2015/EPUBText.html

The finished epub from the class is available at http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/buttontext1.epub

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The image used from the April 6th class on how to play with text in EPUB.

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April is a cruel mistress who swipes time.

It has been over a month since my last post, which was referencing a lab from the end of March. Over the next two weeks I’ll start posting the rest of the contents of the class including the ebooks, labs and workshops I created for April. Over the last month the class played with making CYOA-type ebooks, fiddling around with images, sounds, video, and text to make it work within iBooks. Oh and the students had to turn in 30-page interactive text. And they were amazing.

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Lab from March 30: interactive tabs, quizzes and notes

The lab for our last week in March revolved around making the buttons in InDesign do a lot of the heavy lifting. We worked through how to make them tabs on a page, how to use them for a quiz, and to create a fly out note panel.

The lab ended with instructions on adding the flexslider script to an e-book, but we ran out of time. We will pick this up on april 6.

The lab can be found here: http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/spring2015/EPUBbuttons.html

The finished epub from the class is available at http://rodzvilla.com/EmersonEPub/button.epub

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Path for April classes

As I enter the last month of the semester,  the class will focus on working on specific aspects of the interactive book. This Monday, April 6, we took a look at how to display text on the screen. Next week we talk about images. Then it’s time to work with video and audio and we end the month talking about hypertext fiction and how that can work in this type of text.

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Path for March classes

Now that March is behind us, it’s important to note why I designed the class sequence the way I did. The goal was to get the students to start thinking about ebooks in terms of layout and interactivity. I think most publishers and people who have grown up with books have been conditioned to think of books a certain way. They are linear and controlled. Users can do very little, unless you are talking about books for small children.

And this is a shame. We’ve limited ourselves on what a book can be.

So to break free from the traditional mind-set, I scheduled the classes along this path:

comics and the 4 panel sequence outlined in Lynda Barry’s Syllabus (buy it already).

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Written outline of project

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Story boards

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Paper prototpyes

This should help the student frame the creation of an ebook from idea and component parts through a layout to a prototype. This is simliar to the creative brief to wireframes to prototype that is a common path for web creation.

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This week the class did an exercise in papercasting and then looked at ways to use buttons in InDesign CC 2014 to create different methods of interactivity.

Here’s the information I asked the class to read/ view before class:

Creating Fixed-Layout EPUBs with InDesign CC (Links to an external site.) with Anne-Marie Concepción, Lynda.com, October 14, 2014. (3.5 hours)

See What I Mean (Links to an external site.) by Kevin Cheng, A List Apart, Issue 370, February 26, 2013.

Fixed-Layout Properties (Links to an external site.), EPUB Publications 3.0.1, Recommended Specification from IDPF, June 26, 2014.

Fixed-Layout Documents (Links to an external site.), EPUB Content Documents 3.0., Recommended Specification from IDPF, June 26, 2014.

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March 23 lab on scrollable frames in EPUB

After Iris walked the students through storyboarding, we had another lab on creating interactivity in InDesign. We created slideshows and scrollable frames. The lab and resources for the lab can be found at http://pages.emerson.edu/faculty/j/john_rodzvilla/pb694/spring2015/EPUBAnimation2.html

In order to make some of the scrollable frames work, students need to add epub types. The method for this was posted on an Adobe forum. It’s a good reminder of how new these tools are and how important the community is for those trying to give ebooks the same functionality as interactive PDFs and Folio files in InDesign

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A piece of inspiration for the epub I just posted. One of the pieces from William Kentridge’s “Refusal of Time” installation at the ICA in Boston.