a

The design of multiple media touchpoints alongside the
original text, creating an enriched reading experience.

1 Relevant Media
2 Paratext
3 Text

OPPOSITE
Detail views of the digital text interface.

40

propel users through a narrative while the
text itselfis discarded or diluted.

This is not to say this kind approach to
designing for classic literature is categori-
cally “bad.” Nor is this to moralize exten-
sive editorial interventions to the original
text to the point of oblivion. Indeed, we
often forget that many of Shakespeare’s
plays existed as folk stories before they
were written for stage production. As origi-
nal and adaptation, both Shelley’s text and
Inkle’s app are valid forms to experience
Frankenstein. However, they are also fun-
damentally different modes of experienc-
ing the same narrative, and their example
is the beginning of a vast landscape with
many opportunities. As the book and read-
ing behaviours continue to evolve, and
culturally significant texts continue to
age, designers that work within this space
will be confronted with this question:
how will they evolve the representation
of literary classics alongside changing
user behaviours?

Many studios, publishers, artists, and
directors have produced and are produc-
ing re-imagined retellings of old stories
through gamified storytelling apps, com-
ics, graphic novels, amplified ebooks, and
films. Editorial design for existing texts is
now a wide gradient of media. The varied
combinations and handling of this media
results in a variety of solutions for user
engagement with these texts, and such
was the fundamental problem of my the-
sis project. I chose to design a system for
an enriching experience that would not
involve a complete upheaval of the original
text. I intended to design a book wherein
paratextual content and multimedia serve
as integral components of the experience
and text itself, rather than Ux and UI add-
ons. The particular design of the interface
was to structurally synthesize text with
paratext, and glyphs with imagery. These
principles informed the research of con-
tent for the project, focused the project’s
visual language and form and, ultimately,
helped define the changing role of design-
ers engaged in similar projects as proposed
in the framework developed in my thesis.

The framework’s application in industry
implicates a process of collaboration with
an editor, with the editor acting as a faci-
litator to content research and the designer
as primary determiner and executor of
content. However, within the time and
resource constraints of a short graduate
degree, I acted as both designer and edi-
tor. Three criteria were considered while
selecting a text for this project. The first