Over the last few months the creativity being shown by designers in the digital publishing field has reached new levels. Interactive advertising, immersive articles, easter eggs hidden within content and technologies/implementation that leaves you opened mouthed.

 

Whilst Overlay Creator in InDesign 5+ can't offer gyroscoping or motion detected animation it does offer the following interactive content types:

 

Each of the content types are controlled by finger gestures giving you the power to create exciting interactive environments with zero coding experience. 

 

I have recently been experimenting with the Image Sequence creator. Along with the feature of, playing an image sequence with minimal user interaction, there is the option to allow users to initiate the animation progress and speed using a finger swipe gesture. This opens a real development in the use of stop-frame animation and provides a very natural way for users to experience motion and animation in an immersive way. The ability for the user to control that animation presents interactive design in a much more personable manner. However, the downfall is that each frame of your animation can be examined, so each frame needs to be treated and rendered perfectly.

 

My main piece of advice is for designers to be aware of the space they are designing for. To run the Image Sequence controls at full-screen renders the left and right swipe to page content obsolete as your animation interaction overrides the basic publication functions. Containing the animation in a pane that is inset will allow functionality to be retained. The other primary consideration is, if you are creating landscape and portrait compositions, how will the animation work in the alternate layout. I have found that sometimes constraining my Image Sequence to a square allows for a relatively simple application when applying to both environments.