The key reason I made changes in my edition was that I wanted to make my edition more enjoyable than any other edition. I’ve liked thinking about my edition as having a UX (User Experience) and a UI (User Interface), which I am responsible for maximizing. There are certain given UX and UI features, which give me a solid foundation to create my experience and interface. These givens include WordPress, Mac OS, and Safari, which are designed beautifully, and as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said about the first inventors of fire, electricity, and other innovative technology, they “make an easy way for all, through unknown and impossible confusions.” Using our foundation of these incredible givens, I wanted to further increase the “visibility” and “search-ability” of my ideas. By adding superscript numbers to words I wanted to focus in, and matching them with my section below the play, I aimed to boost the UX/UI of my edition. By using the “Command + F” feature, one can easily toggle back and forth between the word appearing in the play, and my more-thorough analysis of the word in the section below the play. Improved search-ability makes my edition more fun to read, even if it sounds useless, like you could just scroll back and forth. The UX is about the entire experience, start to finish— making it cushier and more pleasant. The UI is about the interface which you, the consumer of media, are interacting with. Accordingly, UX and UI end up basically meaning the same thing. Don’t let it confuse you just because it sounds like jargon. We’re literally all engineering interactive experiences. Although we now have tools that made it easy and simple, at its core, thats what each of us has done for our assignments. We’ve created pieces of digital media, which are designed to be experienced and interacted with.
Another important factor for maximizing UX/UI, which I was adamant on, was limiting the amount of variation in fonts and colors. In my textual variants catalogue, I used color, and font variety, to create systems. I basically color-coded and font-coded things so there were organized “answer key” sections. While I felt proud of the assignment, and I enjoyed what I made, I feel like all-one-color is a much sleeker, less-hectic experience when using WordPress. Maybe if the site that was hosting my edition shared the exact same color, according to hex #, as the color-coding in my version, then I would enjoy it. But since our WordPress site is almost entirely black and white (and very clean), I felt like I should stick to the black and white theme on my edition.
For me, a big part of enjoying what I’m reading is liking the way it sounds out loud. While Shakespeare certainly does a good job of this, I think it’s easy to lose track of the rhymes and harmony that Romeo and Juliet have going back and forth. They talk like they’re a part of the same design blueprint. They’re co-operating. The part I really wanted to highlight this was when Romeo says: “What do you think of that, my love? Let’s talk. It’s not yet day”, and Juliet says: It is, it is. Be gone. Fly away. I feel like that is a perfect back and forth which doesn’t automatically register in my mind in the 1637 edition that I was referencing. By just reading the words, they don’t look like they’re following a pattern. But aloud, they reveal clear geometry and order.
I think probably without considering their designs in terms of UX and UI, the makers of the edition we used for class followed similar rules to me. Low variation in color and visual theme— consistency. Search-ability, to the degree their constraints will allow (academic standards, other conventional publishing protocols). I had the benefit of not needing to appease a group of traditionalists. I could basically design the edition entirely in my vision. It’s interesting how even given this freedom, I tended to do similar things the traditional edition-makers did. The harmonious back and forth of Romeo and Juliet being made as easy as possible to interpret— definitely. As nice and enjoyable an experience as possible— yes, true. I think what our class edition, and the other editions I referenced were missing was in-text search-ability. Like how cool would it be if we could “Command + F” in a book? That would be ideal. I don’t love how my edition is entirely digital. I think it can feel like it’s being shouted in to the abyss if you’re not purposeful about who your audience is. If you don’t have an audience in mind, and you just make a blog post, it’s a cool piece of media, but it’s not going to have the same pressure to be great that it would have if a million people saw it. I feel like I would probably come up with even better ways to maximize the UX and UI if I had the pressure of a million viewers. Until then, doing the best I can!