Front cover

^First front cover design - looked too computerised and didn't fit the style of book i was representing.

^second front cover design - looked like a history book but was too adult like and wasn't appropriate for children.

^current front cover design - although not finished yet this design is appropriate for the target audience and fits in with the style of the rest of the e-book. I wanted to use a character who isn't included in the e-book so i used King Henry the VIII as he is well known and a big personality so i thought it would work well having him on the front cover almost announcing these three other people. 

development of designs

Each individual page has now been fully rendered. I need to finish front cover and then the additional sheet with Shakespeare quotes to go along with that page. 

Origami

In todays lecture we looked at paper engineering and origami. We were showed tutorials of how to make different origami animals/objects. This lecture help us to understand the different add ons which books can include and for me it emphasised how much better physical books were to online books. 

Below are my attempts at some origami.

^crown

^bear

After having a go at some origami we looked at users testing and just how important it is. Before this lecture i didn't think user testing was as important as it is. I knew it had its place and that it was helpful to get feedback from your target audience but after this lecture it really ingrained into me that it had so much positives. From a business point of view i thought it wouldn't be economically sound to churn out loads of prototypes to get user tested but we were shown some stats and a lot of companies made money by getting things user tested and then were able to alter things based on the feedback. This meant the product  was more successful. If they hadn't have had user testing then they wouldn't have got the feedback and therefore the product wouldn't have been a success. 

As a student it isn't feasible to go out with prototypes and get users feedback but it is feasible to make one prototype and a bunch of questionnaires to go along with it. Questionnaires are the most statistically reliable and mot cost effective way of getting user feedback and something i will definitely be doing with my designs. 

Tutorials and Feedback

Last session we had tutorials and feedback from our lecturers. We went through our sketchbooks and tried to get our ideas across. After going through sketchbooks we went through my blog to show how up to date it was and how much info was on there.

The feedback i got from this lecture was really helpful. I found that the front cover which i had done was a bit to adult like and although was lovely and fitted the genre of history it didn't fit 'children's books'. After this feedback i went home and looked into children books a bit more and looked at the colours normally used. Most of the books i looked at all use flat colours and not much shading or detail. This is because children don't really care for detail or shading they just want to see colourful and bold images which they can easily recognise.

Books i looked at:

Another bit of feedback i got was that the E-book is A4 and i was designing for A3. I feel i got carried away with designing and forgot about the brief specifications. I went home and re-designed the pages to fit A4 portrait.

Below are the rough page layouts:

^Handout as part of the Capt. Cook page. The children will map out their journey to school on the this template. 

^Capt. Cook page. Showing his voyages and some info with gaps the children have to fill in. 

^Handout sheet as part of the Queen Elizabeth i page. The objects which the children have to use to try and save Elizabeth from the tower.

^Queen Elizabeth i page. The scroll will host info on Elizabeth with key points blanked out and the children have to find them out.

 ^William Shakespeare page. Again will have some info on Shakespeare and again the key points will be blank and the children fill it in. It will also have the one task written out on there. 

I now need to get these designs on screen and start adding colour and type to them. I also need to re-design the front cover to look more child friendly.