iBooks and Seamless Transitions

How to Train your Dragon

This project was done in a group of three. Amongst brainstorming about what to create an eBook about., the topic of dragons came up. From there, it evolved into How to Train your Dragon.

I began with researching and gathering assets, as well as watching some of the TV show and movies to better familiarize myself with the characters and content. I was able to find many assets on a fandom website, as well as on the Dreamworks site. I created a Google Drive for my group with all of our assets.

We were initially going to direct our book toward kids, implementing a lot of simplicity and activities. We ultimately ended up deciding on focusing more on the story development, characters, and setting. We divvied up the workload as follows: Michelle created the pages for the story development, I created the pages for all the characters, and Jacob created the title and interactive map pages.

I wanted my character pages to be very visual; it only made sense to include images of the characters. There are also dozens of characters, but I decided to highlight the seven that are considered the main characters, along with their dragons. I used .PNG files so they could be easily placed on any background.

For the background on each of these pages, I used an image of the Isle of Berk, which is where How to Train your Dragon takes place.

I dropped the opacity of the image and cropped it in a way that it could appear more seamless. I also flipped the background on every other page and carried the banners over to the next page. Getting the banners to carry over took me longer to do than I’d like to admit. I did finally get it to work, and it was worth it.

For each of the characters’ names, I used a font called Luminari that fit the old-fashioned feel. I searched for various banners that matched this as well. I didn’t want the pages to be text-heavy, so I used progressive disclosure to give the users the option to read more if they wanted to. I added popovers to the name banners and lowered the opacity to 0%. So, when the user taps the character name, it pulls up their description.

Once we combined all of our content into iBooks author, I didn’t like how abrupt the page changes seemed to be between the sections. My teammates had used wood backgrounds in their pages, so got a .PNG of a wooden plank and split it in two, then sized them to be the height of our iBook. This seemed to make the page transitions a little more seamless when the hard edge wasn’t seen.

Group Dynamic

Although the project turned out decently, working in this group didn’t go as smoothly as I anticipated. We were only able to be all together a few times, and that made it very difficult to brainstorm or make any decisions. Once we started communicating better and got ourselves on the same page, we were able to make some cool stuff happen. Going forward, in future teams, I want to make sure a solid method of communication is established (e.g. Slack) for outside of school. As an introverted individual, groups aren’t the most comfortable setting for me. However, I am constantly getting out of that comfort zone and growing. I’ve realized the value of asserting myself and making my ideas and thoughts known.

Courtney Fredrickson is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Interaction & Design. The previous article relates to Final iBooks Project in the DGM 2260 Course and is representative of the skills learned.