I was lucky enough to have the opportunity to work with Touch Press as the designer of their latest iPad App, The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot, published jointly with Faber and Faber. I have previously had the pleasure and privilege of working with Max Whitby and John Cromie, whose achievement is legendary in developing and publishing interactive media content.

The Waste Land launched this week in the UK and US and thus far is being well received, making App of the week in the US. This is fantastic considering The Waste Land does not have the same mass appeal as other more general titles – after all Eliot’s poem, though a milestone in modernist poetry, is difficult for contemporary audiences and is loaded with academic references. The Waste Land iPad App, is a contemporary re-presentation of the poem as a true multimedia textual experience. Around the core poem text, there are carefully crafted layers of interactive media including: readings (by Alec Guinness, Eliot himself, Viggo Mortensen and others), a video performance by Fiona Shaw, critical perspectives (by Seamus Heaney, Craig Raine amongst others), detailed annotated notes, an overlay of the original manuscript and a gallery of related images. All of this additional material serves to enhance the readers’ engagement with the core text of the poem rather than distract from it. Together they build an expanded experience for the reader that helps them to understand the richly woven texture that is The Waste Land.

Designing a successful interactive experience only comes about through real collaboration between technical, creative, subject matter expertise and producers who can glue it all together. The Touch Press team and Faber Digital possess that magic.

For my part, I have tried to present the poem as a beautiful, readable, usable text within an interface that causes minimal interference with the reading experience.  Effectively, I wanted the interface and typography to almost go unnoticed – not to compete with the readers’ attention for an already demanding text. Scala is the typeface family used throughout (designed by Martin Majoor in 1990) - chosen because it is a modern classic, that looks and feels good to read! Scala has good legibility on screen (because of its straight serifs and low contrast) and it encompasses both sans and serif typefaces with a good range of weights that enable texture and contrast in the typography. Making good typography on screen is tricky – in the case of the iPad – because half of the control is split between CSS and Apple’s IOS. It requires a patient understanding software engineer (thank you John!) who will labour with the designer to make small tweaks that ‘nobody else notices’.

Another aspect of design that made for an interesting formal consideration was that of orientation. For example, both the title and contents pages had to work in portrait and landscape format as did the poem text itself. The measure of the type for these orientations also needed to be the same for seamless transition while some features really worked best in one format over another (Notes and Perspectives for example). The issue of type size was significant – initially I designed it in four different measures – to cater for a range of readers. However, the practicalities of ‘pinch & zooming’ the text was difficult because of the poem line breaks which needed to remain faithful to the printed publication. The App does enable the reader to view the text in a larger size via Settings.

There were lots of ‘cool’ things I wanted to try with the typography in The Waste Land when we embarked upon the project – and gradually I realised that you have to walk before you can run. I thought it would great to experiment with three-dimensional representations of the text or to use visualisation techniques to ‘see’ the text. All that remains of these ideas is the Navigator, a view of the text in its entirety that comes up in an overlay on the right margin.

From my perspective, The Waste Land represents an interactive text, and thus is interactive typography as typography gives form to the words in the poem. The words are both content and interface alongside more traditional UI elements such as the tool bar and pop-over menus. My future goal will be to design an interactive text with no visible interface where only the words embody all of the interactivity. Touch-tablet displays offer great potential here – but it takes a while to understand the various gestures available to the reader – and even more time to prototype whether they are intuitive and usable.

In the meantime, The Waste Land is a beginning, there’s lots more to be done.

Check out the links below – some demos and commentary on The Waste Land from various sources including the Guardian, The Independent, The Huffington Post, The New York Times and Gizmodo.

Preview of The Waste Land at the App Store

Faber launches The Waste Land app – video, The Guardian, June 7th 2011.

A Walk Through The Waste Land – video demo by Max Whitby

Raising the Bar for Digital Poetry, The Huffington Post, June 10th 2011.

The Waste Land by App, New York Times, June 11th 2011.

TS Eliot’s The Waste Land Replaces Angry Birds as Greatest Modernist App, Gizmodo, June 10th 2011.

Video Lessons from T.S. Eliot by Steve Smith, Media Post, Thursday, June 9, 2011.

The Revenge Of The CD-ROM by Steve Smith, Thursday, June 9, 2011.

T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ Is iPad App of the Week, Craig Morgan Teicher, Publishers Weekly, June 10th, 2011.

The Waste Land for iPad lovers, by John Naughton, The Observer, June 12th 2011.

The Waste Land, Terry Gray at Palomar College, June 9th 2011.

Microsoft’s Office Labs team conceived this vision of the future – filled with smart objects and seamless UI’s that transfer across their surfaces creating an augmented reality of daily life.

The video for Microsoft was directed by Mason Nicoll (former creative director at Digital Kitchen and Prologue) and the animation and effects were completed by Seattle-based studio Oh, Hello. It was a truly collaborative production. The MS Office Labs team completed the UI designs in Illustrator and also provided sample comp animations in After Effects for Oh Hello. Nicoll directed the live action shoot and produced a final cut before OH did their work.

The outcome is incredibly convincing and slick. The sophisticated roto work coupled with lots of tracking and the ultra smooth animations fit seamlessly with the beautifully crafted (slightly sterile) live action to present a believable image of the future. This little film makes Minority Report’s UI look tame, and yet at the same time it follows the general futuristic picture that is emerging in different quarters. Remember Jeff Han’s talk at TED 2006 and look at recent interfaces like FluidTunes. Even the interactions with the Microsoft’s futuristic news paper mirror those of the iPhone.

It is interesting to imagine a future where touch based and gestural interfaces become commonplace. Imagine seeing your neighbour through the window waving their arms madly as they check what’s on tv or in their fridge or on their music player! From the perspective of screen-based design, UI design and typography – this video presents a glimpse of how the future will fuse motion and interactivity intelligently. If the iPhone is a current example of this trend, these objects will be desirable and irresistible. Its exciting and dreadful at the same time to think of gardening being mediated with a digital overlay.

I finally got an iPhone! It was worth waiting for, though there a few niggly UI things that I have to get used to. Its a must have from a UI design perspective. Creative Review has picked up some of the latest additions to the ever increasing list of new iPhone apps, and two happen to be type related.

Firstly, is the FontViewer by Thomas Podewils at osXwerk.de. It is a fairly basic reference tool for graphic designers: it lists the system fonts found on Apple computers and allows you to examine a type sampler for each font. You can view different sizes using the zoom slider. There’s great potential for this application if you consider it in the context of something like Typophile’s TypeID online resource/forum or Myfonts’ What the font. Imagine if users could upload an image (taken with the iPhone camera) of a font that would then be identified by the app.

On a totally different note is a second type related app by Andreas Muller called For All Seasons. This is a typo animation based loosely on the seasons. It won the Toyko TDC Grand Prix Award in 2005. Muller has now resurrected the work and ported it to the iPhone. Its a quirky piece but it shows off the beauty and surprise of dynamic letterforms when liberated from the traditional page. Its not so much useful as engaging to look at and interesting to muse over.

Everything You Thought We’d Forgotten by Jason E. Lewis collects together a series of text-based interactive works that explore the border lands between conflicting cultural identities, memory and history, and the visual and the textual. Common to all these works is a formal concern with how kinetics and interactivity can be used to expand how digital texts can be written, read and performed. This video of the exhibition with commentary by Lewis explains the work on show and the methods used.

Lewis is a poet, digital media artist and software designer. His practice revolves around experiments in visual language, text and typography, with a core interest in how the deep structure of digital media can be used to create innovative forms of expression. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Computation Arts at Concordia University where he founded and directs Obx Laboratory for Experimental Media. A list of their projects can be found here.

Lewis’ background is not graphic design, but originally computer science and philosophy, later he went to the RCA. His work blends literary, design and programming skills.