Over the past week I have been very interested in a new design challenge: our users personalize their one-of-a-kind book on a Web site - yet what they are purchasing is a printed book.
How is this a design challenge? We're all used to printing Web pages - so you'd think this would be a rather obvious conversion from the printed output of a Web site to the book we produce. But I've noticed a frequent contradiction.
In the Web world, "pages" don't have a fixed length. Since content varies drastically from Web-page to Web-page, the browser automatically adjusts length (sometimes width) to accommodate. This has established a basic design standard - always try to minimize the amount of adornment on a page. Keep it minimal and reduce the need for scrolling.
But in the "printed book" world, almost the opposite is true. That is because the page size is fixed and the content needs to fill it. Also, content can spill over one page and onto additional pages. This means that eventually the chapter in a book ends with a partially filled page (some more empty, some less). Thus a different basic design standard - try to give printed book pages some kind of adornment. In some cases this may be just a graphic border on the top or bottom of the page. But the idea is to warm up the page so that the reader doesn't perceive it as stark.
Worlds collide in our Reverse Publishing Platform. Content that was created for the Web is extracted and fed into our book making platform. Text that originates on a page where everything is kept to a minimum is placed onto a standard 8.5 x 11 page. So how do we create the "adornment"? The idea is a simple but flexible one. Our in-house studio has a great deal of experience building both Web pages and book pages. They create an appropriate background image for each type of page in the finished book, and our application lays the content on top of it.
The result is the best of both worlds. What was once a very useful Web page is transformed into an attractive printed book. Maybe I'm the only one who notices the challenge?
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