Representing Books

[GarethOrmerod]

What is it and who's it for?

In response the a request from the editorial team:

we would like to list Happiness-related books on the On Happiness season page: https://wellcomecollection.org/seasons/YEY3ZBAAACEASBjA at the moment that doesn't work because the cards for books are a different shape to all our other cards https://wellcomecollection.org/books assuming that we might at some point like to standardise on cards with a 16:9 image (@Dominique Marshall do you have thoughts?) for books as well, @Ben Gilbert is working on a template, but there's a big back catalogue to fix if we do.

What's been agreed

• There is a need to visually differentiate a book as product from editorial content (this is currently done through use of a cutout breaking out of a tilted background square)
• A 1:1 aspect ratio is more appropriate for books rather than 16:9 which would contain a large amount of background to object
• The current implementation using cutouts of books looks flat, this could be improved through use of photography to give a better representation of the physical object
• Rather than being inserted into the flow of cards, books are better placed in their own section under a section header

What's been done

Initial concepts from Ben Gilbert:

Other considerations

• How the treatment would appear on a book page

[GarethOrmerod]

From Ben Gilbert:

It’s increasingly becoming necessary to feature books on season pages and exhibition pages and the current implementation isn’t really flexible enough to make this happen.

Ideally Book cards and pages would follow the same 16:9 and 1:1 format as all our other pages. For this to happen we need a way to visualise the books which is slightly more in keeping with all our other photographic and illustrative content.

With this in mind I’ve created some visual options attached to kick off discussions and design ideas. The advantage of these concepts is that all I need is the cover artwork to create them, so it would be quick to update with new books, easy to update changes in cover designs as well as not too much work to tackle the back catalogue.