Redesigning an audiobook
We were given an assignment in class to take an audiobook file and reconstruct almost all of it from the ground up. This meant making new cover art and adding in and deciding what to put for the metadata. Overall, it makes for good practice in thinking about the users. We even learned the seemingly boring task of manipulating metadata and using it to our advantage which can actually be quite interesting. But, for me, this was a revisit of the project.
A year and a bit ago, I took this same class and we did the same project. Last time I choose “The Fellowship of the Ring” for my Audiobook. I say this as a rare opportunity and wanted to make a continuation of the project. So, I chose to do “The Two Towers”. I wanted to keep the theme I had going but I wanted to refine it. Last time I liked the direction I was heading but my art skills have improved and I wanted to flex them a bit.
Being raised by a Lord of the Rings fan, I grew up on the old DVD extended edition set. For me, that is Lord of the Rings. I wanted to add a bit of that into the cover art. So I decided to use the color scheme of the cases as well as the old book theme that they each had going for them.
This time, because I was at “The Two Towers”, I was going to use the red theme instead of the green theme that you can see above (from the first time I took the class). The reason why I stuck with this is there is so much information I needed to display and I wanted to be able to shorten it down but still be able to recognize it at a glance. I think it worked well last time so I thought “why not”? So, knowing this that left me with a red textured “book” style and title. Now for the centerpiece.
I started pulling from the book. The white hand of Saruman was one of the first things that came to my head and thought it was very appropriate for the cover. The white hand alone was good but I wanted something more. I wanted to show the characters, so I needed to place them and the hand in the image together and not have it be too cluttered. So why not use them as the fingers! Ok, so there were 7 surviving at beginning of the book. 5 of which still “together”(perfect!) and 2 off on their own journey. Things just naturally fell into place with Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli (falling behind on the thumb) chasing after Marry and Pippin that are being carried on Uruk-hai. After that, I tried to add a border but I just couldn’t get it to look right and ended up with my first draft of the cover art.
It was good but it needed more so I showed the first version to some classmates and my teacher. I recieved some notes and went back to Affinity Photo. One of the notes was to add a border (of course). This time, however, it worked! I studied some old books and there covers and finally developed something I liked. I even added more details to make it look more like an old book. Then, realizing I wanted it to feel more grounded and to have the hand be actually apart of the background, I added a few effects and textured layers and ended up with my final product!
Now moving on to the less sexy side of this project, the metadata. So, I started with the Chapters. I wanted to differ from how I did them last time; spelling out the numbers and having chapter titles was way too long. This time, I only had the numbers and then chapter title. Because of how I had “The Lord of the Rings” in the Image, in place of title I only put “The Two Towers”. Again, Relying on image to help declutter all of the information. I figured that At a glance, A user could easily find the book based on the image and the consistent theme. Even if the user was on something that didn’t show the image, Having “The Two Towers, by J.R.R. Tolkien” was enough information for them to be able to recognize the book.
Now for Testing. First and foremost was figuring out how to get it onto multiple devices. Since the last time I did the project, I have added to my apple library and now own an iPhone and a Macbook pro as well. On top of that, Apple has moved away from having iTunes for audiobooks like the last time and instead they use iBooks. So now to figure out how to get it out all over again. So I started by adding the file to my google drive so I could move it to my laptop. This same process wouldn’t work for the iPad or iPhone. Of course, I wouldn’t know that until after I had spent hours trying to open the file I had downloaded onto my iPad and phone. There was an easy fix though, which was to borrow a cable and sync my devices to my Macbook. After all that trouble and I finally got the file working, I looked at it and didn’t like just numbers for the chapters. Fortunately for me they started to grow on me over time. With one final review and no real new notes, I was DONE!
It was interesting to touch upon an old project I hadn’t worked on for over a year. I liked to see how I’ve grown and how my understanding of UX has grown too since the last time. It made me really appreciate all of the efforts I’ve put into my learning. Plus it was fun to come up with more Lord of the Rings art.
