A Design Upheaval, Colour & Fonts

I have completely redesigned my iBook! I was getting stuck in rut. I wasn't totally happy with the design I had and felt I needed to choose a better colour scheme. I had a range of colour schemes that I had chosen off of images that I have seen and from research into Flat UI and the colours used, so I decided to explore further with those.

To start off my redesign, I designed the following.

I felt that these more accurately represented the 'Flat UI' style that I was initially going for, but I still wasn't happy.

I disliked the colours and the restriction that it would give me. There is set spaces for images, quotes and main body text and I felt like this would create a real sense of continuation throughout the iBook, but not necessarily in a good way. I wanted a design that gave me the freedom to experiment with a number of different layouts and would allow me to have any images on the page - not just ones that didn't clash with the super specific colour scheme

So, I designed this. 

I made several design decisions when creating this;

The Volcano

This is the same volcano from my original design. I love the jagged, uneven look and felt it worked as a main feature graphic, so kept it.

Smoke/Lava:

Again, the same as the previous design. They look fun and engaging and much more interesting than a standard picture of a volcano which everyone has already seen.

The Title

My original design featured the word 'Volcanoes' in the centre amongst the smoke/lava of the volcano, as if it was part of it. I decided to remove this as I felt it lacked immediate legibility and took the jagged/rough design a bit too far. It was mimicked in the Chapter number titles too and I felt it was making the design look too childish. I wanted to adhere further towards my target audience of 16 year olds, and whilst some may say they would appreciate simplified designs, I feel my previous design was too childish by their standards.

After sketching some ways that I could incorporate a title into my design in an interesting way, I came across a Facebook post advertising a set of free 'ribbons'. I downloaded them, and straight away saw how I could incorporate a current design trend into my design - the ribbon would wrap around the volcano, simple. I could then take this ribbon and use it to symbolise the 'title' on each and every page, and at the start of every chapter.

Colours

I decided to keep the red from my previous design and turn it into more of an 'accent'. It complements the dark blue of the volcano but also the green of the background (which visually is the most overpowering colour), so I liked it. Alongside the red I also have the option of using the yellow (featured in the smoke cloud of the volcano) as an accent too. The plain green background, which is not overly pure, gave me scope to experiment with text colours (for body text) against it, although for know I'm going to be using black.

This redesign has made me excited to continue with the project, as it's a design I am happy with. Sometimes it's easy to develop a bad relationship with a project simply because you know that the design isn't as good as it could be, so I feel I've definitely improved the feel of my iBook through doing this. 

Fonts

I've chosen a font that I'm going to use to represent Titles and perhaps Sub Titles too - 'Chinese Rocks'. It's fun, only displays Uppercase letters and slightly mimics the new, rougher edge design that I'm perusing. It will not be used for body text - for that I'm leaning towards plain Helvetica (a mixture of Regular & Bold). If not, I will experiment further with body text, as the main thing is that it is as readable and legible as possible.