This is a hypothetical iPad application for Clarkesworld, an online science fiction and fantasy literary magazine. (Some material belongs to Tor.com as well.) My goal: make a sleek eReader interface that lets users read the way they want, without any extraneous information. I also wanted to incorporate the visual side of SFF culture more than the Clarkesworld website does.
The app includes a clean eReader that scrolls infinitely in vertical mode or sorts into pages in horizontal mode. There is a search feature, an audiobook section, author profiles, and an illustration gallery. Almost everything can be dragged to a notebook icon in the corner and saved in the bookmark section. The app is controlled by intuitive gestures, such as swiping menus open and shut or dragging to scroll, which means fewer visual distractions on screen.
The trick was coming up with a system. Once I’d figured out how the app generally worked, it was mostly a matter of implying my own internal logic to the rest of the pages. I designed a good number of icons for this project, which I reused a bunch of times. Designing the icons and making a series of interchangeable parts was really satisfying.
I think next time I do something really computer technical like this I’d like to try and incorporate some hand drawn or organic elements and see where that takes me. But Clarkesworld, if you were to make an iPad application, it would be amazing if you dropped me a line.
