With the rapid development of the Internet, layout and design in interfaces has undergone major stages of transformation into the digital world. However mobile app design is still a new topic.
To start, what is the difference in the design process between an E-Book and a “normal” paper book? The first thing which comes to my mind is the way of using them. By way of using I mean that to read a paper book you only need the right light and maybe a cozy chair and a cup of tea, but to read an E-Book you need a device. Every type of device has its own parameters. For example if you take two phones with the same size of display but one has IOS and the other has Android those parameters will be different. Furthermore what about laptops, tablets and other reading devices?
Nevertheless there are rules or more precisely there are trends for the design of electronic publications for different devices.
The main problem or greatest opportunity for creativity is font. In one day you can see thousands of different fonts but a normal person most likely will not even pay attention to them. Moreover no matter how strange it sounds, if you did not pay attention to the font the designer did his job well. Why? Because the font’s main task is to convey information to you. If you pay attention to how beautiful the font is and stop reading the information, then the wrong font was chosen, because you got distracted from the text. Of course there are exceptions like artistic images or logos, but here we’re talking about font for books.
However for electronic publications font size is a particular issue. It seems to me that everyone at least once in his life visited a website on which the font was too small or too large, which made reading the text completely impossible. For apps a good decision is to use a font size from 16 to 18pt. For iOS a technology exist which will make the designer’s work with font much easier (Apple Developer) .
The last rule for today is about the baseline. It is often the case that due to the difference in the display of the text inside the design tools and mobile operating systems, the indentations between the text blocks and other interface elements are visually different. To avoid this consider all indentations relative to the baseline. This approach will maximize your layout with in-app implementation (android does not currently have full support methods for indenting font baselines).
Thank you for reading. See you next week!