Designing Children’s Interactive Pop-up Books: Creating enhanced experiences through the incorporation of animation principles and interactive design.

This thesis, Designing Children’s Interactive Pop-up Books: Creating enhanced experiences through the incorporation of animation principles and interactive design, created by Michael Begay, explores how interactive design and computer graphics can be used to create enhanced user experiences in children’s book design. Key factors taken into consideration during the creation of this thesis include children’s book design, typography, storytelling, animation principles, and interactive design principles. In order to explore the effect computer graphic design has on creating an enhanced user experience in pop-up book design, this project starts with research on writing a compelling, age appropriate story for children between the ages of three and six. After the story is complete, the next step of this project is the creation of a traditional printed pop-up book. This printed pop-up book is then used to inform design decisions around the creation of the interactive pop-up book, such as the types of interactions to use (e.g., pull tabs, drag and drops, and simple clicks) as well as how the pages animate. The interactive pop-up book uses full-screen display and sound to help further create an immersive environment and enhanced reading experience. After finishing the creation of the traditional printed pop-up book and the interactive pop-up book, both books are tested with a group of participants (consisting of parents, caretakers, older siblings, and teachers) who interact with children between the ages of three and six. The tests contain questions related to the story’s comprehensiveness, the overall aesthetic of the illustration style, ease of use, and format preference—printed versus digital. While the findings from these tests suggest that there is a still a wonderment for watching folder paper come to life in three-dimensional forms, the interactive pop-up book has more potential in creating an enhanced reading experience

Letter processing and font information during reading: beyond distinctiveness, where vision meets design

Letter identification is a critical front end of the reading process. In general, conceptualizations of the identification process have emphasized arbitrary sets of distinctive features. However, a richer view of letter processing incorporates principles from the field of type design, including an emphasis on uniformities across letters within a font. The importance of uniformities is supported by a small body of research indicating that consistency of font increases letter identification efficiency. We review design concepts and the relevant literature, with the goal of stimulating further thinking about letter processing during reading

The Creation of typographic specifications for desktop publishing software

As computers become more abundant in the home and office, more people are performing tasks that once would have been done by a skilled professional. Computers and software programs have become easier to use, including desktop publishing programs. Programs are now available that allow anyone to become a designer. Through this, however, most typographers agree, the typographic quality of documents has suffered. Many companies are now designing their own media, in an effort to save money. The documents they create are adequate, but there is something missing. Though they may not be able to explain why, most people can appreciate the appearance of the professionally typeset page. The goal of this thesis project is to make it easier for a non-professional to make typo graphically pleasing text pages. The basic rules of typography, without regard to fluxuating design trends, have essentially stayed the same for hundreds of years. Background research for this project was completed by studying historically significant typographic manuals of the last 300 years. Research began with Joseph Moxon\u27s Mechanick Exercises (1694) and ended with the most recent edition of The Chicago Manual of Style (1993), one of today\u27s most highly regarded manuals. From this background research, minimum and preferred software requirements for desktop publishing software applications were created. The purpose of these requirements is to encourage software manufacturers to incorporate more automation in regard to typography, as well as to encourage improved default settings in their software applications. The goal was to make the minimum requirements realistically achievable. Many of the minimum requirements are currently available in software programs; however, no one program contains all of the requirements. Each software program has strengths and weaknesses. From these lists of requirements, the specifications for the ideal software application were created. Through this ideal application, all of the best features of current software programs were brought together, in addition to a few innovative ideas. These specifications only relate to the typographic capabilities of the software, and do not include other areas such as color or image manipulation. Though these specifications could vastly improve on the quality of typography produced electronically, automated tasks completed by a computer will never produce the same results as a job done manually by a skilled professional. Computer programming is limited and many typographic rules cannot be adequately defined in a computer algorithm. Though perfection may not be attainable, improvement is possible

An Introduction to Programming for Bioscientists: A Python-based Primer

Computing has revolutionized the biological sciences over the past several decades, such that virtually all contemporary research in the biosciences utilizes computer programs. The computational advances have come on many fronts, spurred by fundamental developments in hardware, software, and algorithms. These advances have influenced, and even engendered, a phenomenal array of bioscience fields, including molecular evolution and bioinformatics; genome-, proteome-, transcriptome- and metabolome-wide experimental studies; structural genomics; and atomistic simulations of cellular-scale molecular assemblies as large as ribosomes and intact viruses. In short, much of post-genomic biology is increasingly becoming a form of computational biology. The ability to design and write computer programs is among the most indispensable skills that a modern researcher can cultivate. Python has become a popular programming language in the biosciences, largely because (i) its straightforward semantics and clean syntax make it a readily accessible first language; (ii) it is expressive and well-suited to object-oriented programming, as well as other modern paradigms; and (iii) the many available libraries and third-party toolkits extend the functionality of the core language into virtually every biological domain (sequence and structure analyses, phylogenomics, workflow management systems, etc.). This primer offers a basic introduction to coding, via Python, and it includes concrete examples and exercises to illustrate the language's usage and capabilities; the main text culminates with a final project in structural bioinformatics. A suite of Supplemental Chapters is also provided. Starting with basic concepts, such as that of a 'variable', the Chapters methodically advance the reader to the point of writing a graphical user interface to compute the Hamming distance between two DNA sequences.Comment: 65 pages total, including 45 pages text, 3 figures, 4 tables, numerous exercises, and 19 pages of Supporting Information; currently in press at PLOS Computational Biolog

Large scale experiments on correction of confused words

The paper describes a new approach to automatically learn contextual knowledge for spelling and grammar correction; we aim particularly to deal with cases where the words are all in the dictionary and so it is not obvious that there is an error. Traditional approaches are dictionary based, or use elementary tagging or partial parsing of the sentence to obtain context knowledge. Our approach uses affix information and only the most frequent words to reduce the complexity in terms of training time and running time for context-sensitive spelling correction. We build large scale confused word sets based on keyboard adjacency and apply our new approach to learn the contextual knowledge to detect and correct them. We explore the performance of auto-correction under conditions where significance and probability are set by the user

The Design of Packaging Graphics for the expansion of Ghanaian Chocolate products

Ghana is a country well-endowed with various natural resources. Many of these resources are exported to other countries. Cocoa plays an important role in the economy of Ghana. It is the second foreign exchange earner and the lives of many farmers and their families depend on it. Cocoa products like chocolate, pebbles, cocoa powder feature prominently on the menu in many homes, restaurants and hotels. The purpose of this study is to develop an effective packaging design prototype that uses cultural references to communicate Ghana, differentiate the brand from others and attract the consumer through sight sensory, an integral component of the sensory which produce emotions leading to decision making towards purchase. Based on the research-study and analysis of the evaluation matrix on some selected existing chocolate brand packages from five different countries namely: Divine Chocolate (Ghana), Golden Tree Chocolate (Ghana), Milka (German), Hershey chocolate (USA), Villars (Switzerland), Michel Cluizel (France), the prototype design was developed

The adoption and impact of computer integrated prepress systems in the printing and publishing industries of Kuwait

This research is aimed at developing a comprehensive picture of the implications of digital technology in the graphic arts industries in Kuwait. The purpose of the study is twofold: (1) to explore the meaning of the outcomes of recent technological change processes for the traditional prepress occupations in Kuwait; and, (2) to examine the impact of technology on Arabic layout and design. The study is based on the assumption that technological change is a chain of interactions among the sociological, cultural, political and economic variables. The prepress area in Kuwait has its own cultural, social, economic, and political structure. When a new technology is introduced it is absorbed and shaped by the existing structure. Based on such a dialectical conceptualisation, four major levels of analysis can be distinguished in this study: (1) technological change in the graphic arts industries; (2) the typographic evolution of the Arabic script; (3) the workers themselves as individuals and occupational collectives; and, (4) technology's impact on Arabic publication design. The methodological approach selected for this study can be defined as a dialectical, interpretive exploration. Given the historical perspective and the multiple levels of analysis, this approach calls for a variety of data gathering methods. Both qualitative and quantitative data were sought. A combination of document analysis, participant observation and interviewing allow to link the historical and current events with individual and collective actions, perceptions and interpretations of reality. The findings presented in this study contradicts the belief that the widespread adoption of new production processes is coincidental with continuous advances in scientific knowledge which provide the basis for the development of new technologies. Instead, the changes have been hindered by the lack of untrained personnel, the Arabic software incompatibility, and the lack of informed decisions to successfully implement the technology. Without any doubt, the new technology has influenced Arabic calligraphy, but this does not mean the decay of Arabic calligraphy as an art. As this study shows, the challenge is not to the art, but to the artist

Text-based Spatial and Temporal Visualizations and their Applications in Visual Analytics

Textual labels are an essential part of most visualizations used in practice. However, these textual labels are mainly used to annotate other visualizations rather than being a central part of the visualization. Visualization researchers in areas like cartography and geovisualization have studied the combination of graphical features and textual labels to generate map based visualizations, but textual labels alone are not the primary focus in these representations. The idea of using symbols in visual representations and their interpretation as a quantity is gaining more traction. These types of representations are not only aesthetically appealing but also present new possibilities of encoding data. Such scenarios regularly arise while designing visual representations, where designers have to investigate feasibility of encoding information using symbols alone especially textual labels but the lack of readily available automated tools, and design guidelines makes it prohibitively expensive to experiment with such visualization designs. In order to address such challenges, this thesis presents the design and development of visual representations consisting entirely of text. These visual representations open up the possibility of encoding different types of spatial and temporal datasets. We report our results through two novel visualizations: typographic maps and text-based TextRiver visualization. Typographic maps merge text and spatial data into a visual representation where text alone forms the graphical features, mimicking the practices of human map makers. We also introduce methods to combine our automatic typographic maps technique with spatial datasets to generate thema-typographic maps where the properties of individual characters in the map are modified based on the underlying spatial data. Our TextRiver visualization is composed of collection of stream-like shapes consisting entirely of text where each stream represents thematic strength variations over time within a corpus. Such visualization enables additional ways to encode information contained in temporal datasets by modifying text attributes. We also conducted a usability evaluation to assess the potential value of our text-based TextRiver design

Letters to Messages – A Toolkit for Improved Visual Communication

The basis of this thesis was to solve a design problem: irrational and misleading visuals. Students of visual arts are increasingly expected to create visual presentations of their work. In-depth knowledge is not unconditionally essential for these students, however, it does bring a big advantage and reinforces other visual skills. This thesis aims to inspire, educate and assist anyone who is using visual communication, but lacks formal training in graphic design. The aesthetic goal of this thesis is to bring out the beauty of functional, smart and witty design. Presented in the form of a book, the thesis discusses all stages in the process of creating visual communication – starting from the initial ideation, moving on through style choices, assembly of the elements into a finished end product, and its destination context. The main conclusions to be drawn are related to context, interpretation and usability. The context – as final usage environment and pre-existent background of the audience – should be considered a defining factor throughout the process. Interpretation of visual communication is always subjective and affected by e.g. the viewer’s mindset, cultural background and personal taste. Visual interpretation is based on perception of properties, and encoding should include all elements of the entity. These theories are communicated through illustrations, which show the practical consequences of decisions in the process by giving comparisons. The reader will achieve better visuals through an understanding of perception and interpretation. In addition to illustrations offering comparisons, the book also includes some association exercises to support the rational design process. The principles of this book can be applied to digital, printed and online work, such as portfolios, posters, publications, presentations and personal marketing material.Utgångsläget för denna avhandling var att lösa ett designproblem: irrationell och förvirrande visuell kommunikation. Mera än tidigare förväntas studeranden inom konstämnen själv framställa visuella presentationer av sina arbeten. För dessa studeranden är det inte nödvändigt att ha fördjupade kunskaper i grafisk design, men förståelse för visuell kommunikation är till en stor fördel och stärker övrigt visuellt kunnande. Avhandlingens målsättning är att inspirera, informera och hjälpa studeranden som utnyttjar visuell kommunikation, men saknar utbildning i grafisk design. Det estetiska målet för arbetet är att att lyfta fram skönheten i praktisk, rationell och klipsk visuell formgivning. Min personliga avsikt var att få kompletterande förståelse för ämnet och samtidigt vidareutveckla min professionella identitet samt det egna uttrycket. Avhandlingen, som presenteras i form av en bok, behandlar alla skeden i processen kring att skapa visuell kommunikation, från den inledande idén till stilval, sammanställning av elementen till ett färdigt arbete och helhetens slutkontext. Semiotik, typografi och komposition presenteras genom en sammanfattning av sju litterära verk. De slutsatser som kan dras är att slutkontexten bör fungera som utgångsläge och motiverande faktor i alla val genom hela processen. Pragmatiska regler bör beaktas ifall det inte är ändamålsenligt och motiverat att skapa spänning. Tolkning av visuell kommunikation är alltid subjektivt och påverkas bland annat av åskådarens inställning, kulturella bakgrund och personliga smak. Komposition är relativt, och därmed måste alla delar av arbetet behandlas individuellt och ses i relation till de övriga delarna. Teorierna kommuniceras via illustrationer, som erbjuder klara jämförelser av konsekvenserna för de val som ingår i processen. Läsaren får redskap för framställning av mera ändamålsenlig visuell kommunikation genom en bättre förståelse för perception och tolkning. Förutom illustrerade jämförelser erbjuder boken även några konkreta associationsövningar som stöder den rationella arbetsprocessen. Bokens innehåll kan utnyttjas för tryckt, digitalt och internetbaserat material, så som portfolier, planscher, publikationer, presentationer och personligt marknadsföringsmaterial. Processen bakom skapandet av boken har varit extremt belönande: både det teoretiska innehållet och det kreativa skapandet erbjöd många insikter och stunder av förtjusning. Fördelarna med långsam bearbetning har förtydligats och arbetet har stärkt mitt förtroende för formgivningsprocessers fruktsamhet. Boken motsvarar mina värderingar som formgivare och utgör ett genuint arbetsprov på mitt estetiska uttryck