The Animal Farm interactive book was a project for the International Society of Typographic Designers’ student assessment scheme. The brief required me to pick a chapter from a banned book and turn it into a digitally dynamic app with qualities that cannot be seen in print. I picked chapter 7 from George Orwell’s classic, Animal Farm. The book faced censorship in UK initially and was also banned from USSR because of its strong allegorical take on Stalin.
Banning books in the digital age is not entirely possible as procuring banned material over the internet is fairly easy. I decided to use this point throughout my project and make it slightly tedious to read the text but it was not entirely censored or blacked out. The visual language was drawn from the work of El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism.
Banning books in the digital age is not entirely possible as procuring banned material over the internet is fairly easy. I decided to use this point throughout my project and make it slightly tedious to read the text but it was not entirely censored or blacked out. The visual language was drawn from the work of El Lissitzky and Russian Constructivism.
The main characteristic of the app, which would not translate to print, was its ability to draw parallels between the incidents of Animal Farm and Communist USSR under Stalin. The user could read historic facts alongside reading the story. Features of the app were:
- interactive redacted text revealed with 3D touch
- allegories of the characters and who they actually represented historically
- archival documentary footage and newspaper articles of parallel events in USSR
- dialogues and conversations with kinetic typography playing out with a voiceover.
- interactive redacted text revealed with 3D touch
- allegories of the characters and who they actually represented historically
- archival documentary footage and newspaper articles of parallel events in USSR
- dialogues and conversations with kinetic typography playing out with a voiceover.
