The Elements eBook for iPad

For my final major project, I've decided to use modify an existing competition brief changing some aspects of it to suit me and ensure it is possible to produce within the time limit. The Puffin competition brief asks you to create your own story for 3-6 year olds and requires you to create imagery for the iPad. Animations are to be included and ways of making the story on the iPad are to be considered. I've decided that I'm going to use an existing story instead of writing my own and include all the other aspects to the brief such as the animating and interaction.

I think this subject is very current as it addresses one of the newest technologies; being able to download books and read them on screen without having to go to a book shop and buying a book. This new technology opens a lot of possibilities from a designer's view because animation can now take place with the books being read on the screen, reading time for children can be a lot more interactive and valuable. I think I've answered my final major project well, by choosing this as my theme because it is very up to date with the industry.

I've looked at a few videos about the iPad. This is one that particularly stands out. It consists of objects that represent every element in the periodic table. It ties in with my work, as some of my work is three dimensional and in this video it shows the objects being rotated 360 degrees and moved around on the screen. I think this is quite relevant to my work, as I have the advantage of getting different angles of my models/sets. I think I can use some of these ideas to animate my models.

The idea of rotating the objects on screen is really effective as its very informative and instructive, which is the main purpose of having the periodic table on the iPad. It seems to be a very valuable way of learning information as every object seems to hold facts about it when you tap it and it slowly rotates so you can see exactly what every object looks like. It makes it so real that you feel you can almost touch them, which I think, is a nice idea for children’s books. Perhaps when you touch a character from the story, information about that character would be displayed or a joke/comment would be shown which children would appreciate and hopefully get excited about.