Web-based magazine design for self publishers

Abstract

Short run printing technology and web services such as MagCloud provide new opportunities for long-tail magazine publishing. They enable self publishers to supply magazines to a wide range of communities, including groups that are too small to be viable as target communities for conventional publishers.In a Web 2.0 world where users constantly discover new services and where they may be infrequent patrons of any single service, it is unreasonable to expect users to learn the complex service behaviors. Furthermore, we want to open up publishing opportunities to novices who are unlikely to have prior experience of publishing and who lack design expertise.Magazine design automation is an ambitious goal, but recent progress with another web service, Autophotobook, proves that some level of automation of publication design is feasible. This paper describes our current research effort to extend the automation capabilities of Autophotobook to address the issues of magazine design so that we can provide a service to support professional-quality self publishing by novice users for a wide range of community types and sizes.

Quantifying Aesthetics of Visual Design Applied to Automatic Design

“…We also use the idea of making and breaking grids, comprehensively discussed in [264]. The idea of automated layout has recently been used in the design of photo-books [274], webbased magazines [111], and semi-automated magazine layout [112]. The main difference between prior work and our work could be the fact that we apply the layout onto a bitmap, or an image, as the background, or the canvas, rather than a white space.…”

“…We believe that color semantics is a legitimate challenge to be addressed in various venues of HCI: in automatic design [107][108][109][110][111][112], design by example [113][114][115][116], design grammar [117], design of user interaction [118][119][120][121][122][123][124][125], quantifying aesthetics of design [26,28,99], user experience design [126][127][128][129][130][131][132], and color design [40,[133][134][135][136][137][138]. For instance, in design by example, although users are supported by a pool of designs and some mechanisms help them choose their preferred designs [116], there is no well-defined interaction to understand the user's purpose of designs or what color combinations should be selected from their preferred designs.…”

“…Magcloud.com [259], for instance, supports users to publish magazines and advertisements for either web or print. Automatic design of magazines discussed in [111] is another example of such efforts. Automatic design of magazine covers is another concept that can be deployed to support current and future self-publishing work.…”

Recommendation system for automatic design of magazine covers

“…We also use the idea of making and breaking grids, comprehensively discussed in [33]. The idea of automated layout has recently been used in design of photo-books [42], web-based magazines [17], and semi-automated magazine layout [25]. The main difference between the prior work and our work is perhaps the fact that we apply the layout onto a bitmap, or an image, as the background, or the canvas, rather than a white space.…”

Colors $-$Messengers of Concepts: Visual Design Mining for Learning Color Semantics

“…We believe that color semantics is a legitimate challenge to be addressed in various venues of HCI: in automatic design [Lok and Feiner 2001;Gajos and Weld 2004;Hurst et al 2009;Jahanian et al 2012;Hunter et al 2011;Kuhna et al 2012], design by example [Hartmann et al 2008b;Herring et al 2009;Kumar et al 2011], design grammar [Talton et al 2012], design of user interaction [Carroll 1997;Fallman 2003;Löwgren 2007;Zimmerman et al 2007;Forlizzi et al 2008;Stolterman 2008;Hashim et al 2009;Chen 2011], quantifying aesthetics of design [Lavie and Tractinsky 2004;Datta et al 2006;Reinecke et al 2013], user experience design [Hassenzahl and Tractinsky 2006;Mahlke 2008;Hartmann et al 2008a;Löwgren 2009;Law 2011;Bargas-Avila and Hornbaek 2011;van Schaik et al 2012], and color design [Luo 2006;Tokumaru et al 2002;Tsai and Chou 2007;Wang et al 2008;Ou et al 2009;Hsiao et al 2013;Jahanian et al 2013a]. As Fallman argues, HCI needs to be understood and acknowledged as a design-oriented process in terms of philosophy and theory and methodological foundations [Fallman 2003].…”