Attempting to go Open Source with our Print Workflow

By shirley, December 10, 2015

While researching the challenges experienced in the hybrid publishing field, the issue of proprietary software and its limitations has cropped up from a few sources. So, I thought we could give Scribus (Open Source layout software) a test run using a chapter from the most recent Theory on Demand publication and see if it could [...]

Testing the Manual online

By shirley, November 30, 2015

The PublishingLab manual has made its way off a paper and on to the web. In order to see if this format would be useful to new interns, it needed testing. I used the User Checks method taught by Anoushka Scholten because checks are intended to be iterative, real users attempt real tasks with design, [...]

Fixed Layout ePubs: useful or backward?

By shirley, November 9, 2015

It seems there’s no perfect solution yet in the digital publishing realm for art publishers. It’s apparent that the reflowable ePub format does not suit visual publications very well, but is fixed layout ePub (FXL) the solution? What’s a fixed layout ePub? A fixed layout epub can be described as a hybrid of pdf & [...]

Curation as publishing/publishing as curation: a talk by Florian Cramer

By cgmt87, November 5, 2015

On the 4th of November, Florian Cramer (artist, writer, theorist and director of Creating 010) gave a talk at Piet Zwart Institute (Rotterdam) on topic: “Curation as publishing/publishing as curation”. Or how to publish in an hybrid way, regarding the evolutions of reading with the Internet age. Refusing to consider digital media as an “upgraded” [...]

We are looking for students to join us in the...

Looking for an internship? Applications for 2016 are now open!

By , November 3, 2015

We are looking for students to join us in the second semester (February-June), to work on multidisciplinary projects assigned by external partners from the field. Gain professional experience in an international setting, with research, design, editing and publishing! Details on our offering, skill requirements, and application you will find here. Dutch students may also apply [...]

Usability Research: Testing Mobile

By shirley, October 30, 2015

On Thursday the PublishingLab visited the Usability Lab, in preparation for our interns conducting their own user tests on the App they’re developing for the UNStudio Project. Eyetracking One thing to be aware of with mobile testing is exporting video with visualisations for each ‘page’ seen by the viewer, otherwise the maps remain and can [...]

Electric Comics – A Report From the First Ever Digital Comics Symposium

By Geert Lovink, October 26, 2015

The Comic Electric: A Digital Comics Symposium took place on October 14th 2015 at the University of Hertfordshire in Hatfield. Being the first ever scholarly conference on digital comics, The Comic Electric inaugurated the beginnings of a thrilling new area of study. The day kicked off with a Keynote speech from the organisers of the event, and was [...]

Lessons learned from PUSH UX Conference: from Medium to Mozilla

By shirley, October 26, 2015

This friday, I had the opportunity to attend PUSH Conference Munich and hear from two talented designers and user experience professionals. The first, Dustin Senos gave insights into what he’d learned from the process of designing for Medium. Jen Simmons finished the day with a call to action: it’s time to bring real art-direction to [...]

A Manual as a Living Document

By shirley, October 13, 2015

This post documents my attempt to turn UX principles on our current manual used with interns at the PublishingLab, luckily for me – I have a captive test-audience! The content is already 90% written, with an existing table of contents so I began with card sorting to test the intuitiveness of the sections. The first [...]

Sadly, it does not have anything to do writing your...

What’s writing got to do with it (UX design)?

By shirley, October 1, 2015

Sadly, it does not have anything to do writing your next novel. It does have to do with how writing helps users find their way around your design. Can someone get what they need from your site, book or App without frustration? You probably have some effective writing in your interface. This post will briefly [...]

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