Brainspring Digital Library:
Digital Publishing & Management
Brainspring
Digital Library:
Digital Publishing & Management
Overview
The Brainspring Digital Library was a major step forward for Brainspring, moving their textbooks from a traditionally published format to a new, eco-friendly, easy to access, digital format. I launched, maintained, and updated the library with new and refreshed materials on a regular basis. All Brainspring employees, educators, customers, and students use the digital library on a daily basis.
Programs Used
InDesign, Acrobat, Distiller, Kitaboo Studio
Digital Publishing
Brainspring’s various professional development courses consist of over fifty different eBooks published on the digital library, each spanning anywhere from thirty to four-hundred pages each. Each title was laid out and completed in InDesign, reviewed and optimized in Acrobat, then enhanced and published via Kitaboo Studio.
Each eBook available in the digital library has a complete Table of Contents built in both the book and the digital library’s reader menu, interactive elements such as videos, audio files, and resource downloads. The main goal of all these enhancements was to offer something that traditionally published books could not: an interactive experience that would make these huge books easier to navigate.
Digital Bookshelf
The digital library is split into two parts: the bookshelf and the reader. The bookshelf is divided into collections, each pertaining to a different Brainspring course, which offer every book required for that course. These small course and book cover thumbnails were often individually designed to be legible at such a small scale.
A Reliable Reader
With educational materials often requiring small tweaks to better align with changing educational standards, Brainspring’s course books are updated often, and the digital library allows those changes to come to users quickly. Book refreshes were completed in InDesign, sometimes adding up to one-hundred pages of new content, before being published and pushed to the live reader.
Design Development - App Icon
Another critical part of creating an app with its own, unique identity was designing both an application icon and a logo. I began with sketches of the most iconic aquarium fish, a goldfish. From there I came up with other elements, such as a hand to symbolize human interaction with fish as well as the fishbowl shape that the arm creates to reinforce that the topic of the app is aquariums.
Design Development - Icon & Logo
From my initial icon sketches, I created a finished app icon and logo in Illustrator. The colors used in this branding also came directly from the app’s style guide. While the app icon remained similar to my initial sketches, the Aquarium Advisor logo did not. Since the name of the app is included in the logo, I removed repetitive elements such as the fishbowl hand in order to prevent cluttering the logo with unnecessary design elements.
