Collaborative Book Layout Design
Living FreshExploring graphic intent communication in publishing workflows
Researcher
Emma-Jade De Moor
1st year PhD Student in HCI and Design
Supervisors: Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Wendy Mackay, Lorène Picard
Research Context
Studied Domain
Graphic/Layout Design in physical, digital and multimedia book publishing workflows.
Research Methodologies
User centered design, story interviews, object-based interviews, corpus analysis, generative theories of interaction.
Observed Practices
Traditional and alternative (free and/or web-based) book layout practices.
Observed Artefacts
Adobe tools, FLOSS design softwares, web technologies and code writing tools, communication and coordination tools (messaging apps, pads, clouds).
Identified Issues
🏢 Organizational
Publishing professionals have different goals within a project and struggle to share a common language. For example, different views of the layout (as a tool, as a result of the actual state of the project). For book collections, the work is often passed to a second designer who needs to apply the graphical intentions of the first one. It is hard to communicate those intentions with current tools.
🔧 Technical
Different roles within a project require different softwares which are not interoperable. Alternative tools are hard to use without coding skills. Graphic design tools lack support for expliciting graphical intents and keeping them persistent over time.
⚖️ Governance
When using InDesign, the proprietary nature of the software makes it hard for other people to interact with the layout, even for proof-reading. With web-based practices, people without coding skills may feel excluded from the project. Graphic designers may feel frustrated when their graphical intents (and possibly their intellectual property) are not respected.