Saturday 15 January 2011

Craig Mod's Infinite Canvas

Craig Mod is based in Japan and is a writer, designer and book publisher.  He has written two really interesting pieces on how books may be designed in the future and the opportunities that the iPad platform offers to authors, designers, publishers and readers. 


This piece - Books in the age of the iPad is a very thought provoking article on the difference between formless and definite content and the implications of this difference for e-readers, iPads and physical (i.e. paper) books. 


This piece - A Simpler Page is his latest and uses a concept that Scott McCloud invented - the Infinite Canvas, illustrated below. Craig then uses this as the basis for a new set of open source libraries he calls Bibliotype that allow HTML to be used as the basis for any long-form text project that needs good design and typography and to be able to handle iPad and browsers and three viewing distances that he calls bed, knee and breakfast.