Digital Design Project: theboar.ca

Mohammad Jangda — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 06:34:55 +0000

My independent digital design project (DAC 400) completed as part of my Digital Arts Communication specialization explored the push by magazines into the online and technology spaces. The goal of the project was to explore viable technologies to use as a platform for developing an online presence for The Boar, an arts and literary magazine produced by and for the students in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Waterloo. I explored the traditional online website format but looked further by designing a prototype of an up-and-coming Flash-based technology known as the “digital edition.” This “new technology” is being adopted industry-wide like wildfire (see Issuu, Scribd, Zinio, etc.). It takes a traditional PDF and converts it into an interactive magazine-like object on a webpage that can be used and manipulated much like a physical magazine. My prototype (although not entirely functional) took a step further and explored the possibilities of creating greater ties between a magazine’s website and their digital edition via a synchronization of comments, bookmarking, and other social networking type tools.

As supplementary materials, I have attached 3 documents that I completed as part of my project:

Technology Research: exploration of various technologies in use by the magazine industry and what movements the trends were indicating.
Strategy, Scope & Structure: Documentation outlining requirements for the online presence and drill down into specifics, as well as a high-level architectural diagram.
Final Analysis: Analysis of the end result of my project, including rationale for technical and design choices as well as possible enhancements for the future.

Also included is a somewhat-working version of the digital edition prototype.

The website in its current state, which has deviated slightly from the original design, can be found here: http://theboar.ca

User Interface Design: CanTeach Volunteer Handbook

Mohammad Jangda — Fri, 23 May 2008 18:05:08 +0000

The final result of the group project for class, DAC 300 (Special Topics in Digital Design: User Interfaces). We created a Volunteer Handbook for CanTeach International, a Waterloo-based organization that sends volunteers to Central America to assist Teachers in schools.

The aim of the project was to design, prototype and test an electronic handbook to be used by volunteers new to the CanTeach program. The expectation was for volunteers to use the handbook throughout all phases of their journey (before, during, and after) as a learning and information gathering tool. The handbook was also to act as an electronic scrapbook of sorts, with tools for volunteers to capture their experiences in text.

The final prototype is below along with various supplementary materials related to the project.

CanTeach Volunteer Handbook (~3MB file; requires TK3 Reader)

Note: Since the prototype requires TK3Reader to be installed, I have included sample screenshots of the eBook as well.

Tools used: TK3 Author, Adobe Photoshop

Supplementary Materials:

Architecture diagrams

Initial Draft

Final Architecture

Strategy and Scope Document: http://www.scribd.com/full/3088149?access_key=key-2exzroa8srabm4b2nl5d

Presentation: http://www.scribd.com/full/3088089?access_key=key-1ibct2pwtngup105sysb

digitalize.ca » Digital Design

Digital Design Project: theboar.ca

User Interface Design: CanTeach Volunteer Handbook