I was invited to lead Penguin USA's entrance into the iOS reader app space through its release of On the Road: Amplified Edition. Jack Kerouac's definitive novel of the Beat generation had a largely autobiographical origin which lent itself to an interactive exploration of text, subtext, backstory and setting. My designed experience brings the user closer to characters and their real-life counterparts, supplemental text, photos and spatial exploration through a map of the routes taken by Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty.
To keep the experience of the novel intact in the face of additional rich material, I designed and illustrated the cover itself to serve as its own navigational device. It is at once an integration of utility and content, dispensing with these distinctions to create an organically functional and emotionally resonant experience.
My deliberate typographic layout of the app is meant to relate to a tactile, immersive reading experience for the user—using a rigid grid structure and classical page proportions, while gracefully allowing further exploration as desired. I developed a system of sidenotes to indicate supplemental content, which can expose a header while allowing continued reading with preserved line breaks. Tapping the header slides the existing page aside, revealing a deeper exploration below.
My artwork for supplemental sections again doubles as a navigational device for content, merging text and image into an evocative and functional whole.
Users may experience the travels of Sal Paradise and Dean Moriarty through a spatial display of the novel in the map feature. Trips are delineated by year, and major locations are described in historical context, while allowing for cross-referenced links back to relevant passages of the novel.
As the novel pre-dates the existing interstate system, I needed to build the map feature from older map references. Existing map supplements had many omissions or anachronistic routes, so I cross-referenced the novel with mid-century map sources to create a new and chronologically accurate guide.
While the app's typography related to the timeframe of the novel, header text required a treatment that evoked the reckless abandon of the protagonists, while echoing the Beats' post-war affinity for Eastern aesthetics. My original India ink calligraphy frames the major sections of the app within this subtext.
I served as creative lead on the project through 1K Studios, establishing typographic and visual style, developing user flow mechanisms, and creating all original artwork, photography and calligraphy.
