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Tao Liu is a New York-based digital designer and a member of the artist collective //PIXELMOUTH.
Zene
Interactive Prototype
Porduct Design
Figma; Adobe CS
Zene is a web-based book making tool for book arts and self publishing. Unlike traditional book design softwares like InDesign, Zene approaches book making as digital prototyping. Zene enables everyone to make books by bridging the gap between finishing the design and printing & assembling the book. To see the case study, click here.
To start a book design project, you can draw any freeform geometry and the shape you drew will be treated as a sheet of paper.
When you stack multiple sheets of paper, you can then use the Bonefolder tool to fold the stack in the diretion you prefer. After folding, you can bind the stack by stapling the folding line. The corresponding spreads will be automatically generated in reading order. Now you have a book where you can start putting in the content.
Leveraging the workflow of web-based software, you can import any images or text into the Zene editor directly from the web. First, install the Zene Chrome Extension plugin, which will allow you to right-click on any images or highlighted text and save it to your current project. You can then collage it into the layout of your book.
Zene provides 2 different views to your book: the Sheets view and the Spreads view. While the Spreads are your design canvases, the Sheets are the individual sheets of paper synchonized with the design of the spreads. The double view feature informs you not only how the design looks but also how to book will be constructed.
Additionally, you can define the type of paper and printing method you will use for each sheet of paper; these decisions will also be rendered in the spreads view.
Once you are done and ready to export for printing, you can freely choose the order of those collated sheets based on your needs: the whole document, individual sheets (if you want to outsource the printing of a specific page), or fronts and backs (if your printer doesn’t support double-sided printing).
you can try it out yourself in this Figma prototype.