William Jeffrey Rankin / Blog / Articles tagged with "design"

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The Horror of Mistvale Hall ~ Colophon

By William Jeffrey Rankin, Thu Oct 31 2024

The Story

The Horror of Mistvale Hall was written using Wordperfect. In addition to the MS itself this includes story notes, chronologial and narrative outlines, and other supporting documents. Upon completion the MS was imported into LibreOffice Writer and the paperback and hardcover editions created. Body copy is Times New Roman and the title font is Rakkas, a Google font designed by Zeynep Akay.

The Covers

Three distinct covers (eBook, paperback, and hardcover) were created in GIMP. Vector elements (typographic and glyphs) were created using Inkscape. Rakkas was again utilized for the title and author text. The subtitle font ("A Jonathan Quint Adventure") is Futura. The back cover copy is Times New Roman.

eBooks

The eBooks (Kindle and EPUB) were created by importing the MS into Kindle Create. Kindle Previewer was used for initial proofing. The Kindle App (desktop and tablet) was utilized as well in the proofing stage.

Maps & Floor Plans

Maps and floor plans were created using Inkarnate.

Source Control

All files were versioned using Apache Subversion.

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Self-referential design (aka why usability testing is important)

By William Jeffrey Rankin, Sat May 19 2018

Some notes on why self-referential design is a problem, and why usability testing is important.

Notes:

The team will have changes to the product design in mind: enhancements or new features.
There will be overlap in the design changes desired among the team members.
Usability testing will confirm that some of the changes suggested by the team are necessary.
There will likely be many unanticipated discoveries: completely new issues, designs thought well-vetted present difficulties for users, and those thought of as clunky prove to be intuitive or usable. This is why we test!
Takeaway: Self-referential design will cause you to fix problems that aren't there, and miss real problems that would have been discovered through usability testing.