Goodreads App: Back from the Dead

This summer, during an effort to streamline the apps on my phone and organize them in a more coherent way, I decided to finally get rid of my Goodreads app. It made me sad, but honestly, I never used it.

Goodreads is one of those products that I want to love. It’s right up my alley, using technology to enhance the reading experience in new ways. It’s focus on the social aspects reading—the shared experiences created by reading books, recommending books, talking about books, and discovering new books, is awesome. I love it. I religiously update my profile online every time I finish a new book.

But that Goodreads iPhone app was not great. I was really not a fan of their brown-on-brown-on-brown color scheme, and it was kind of clunky to use, with its opening screen taking me from my iPhone homepage to a second homepage of Goodreads app-like icons that seemed to head off into their own worlds. In addition to these icons, there were five navigational options along the bottom bar, and along the top, a Search Bar and Messages and Updates indicators. There were so many options, a lot of which I wasn’t interested in, that it felt more overwhelming rather than enticing me to use it. It didn’t help that the app seemed buggy and was constantly logging me out.

So I was thrilled when I learned recently (thanks to this TechCrunch article), about the Goodreads app redesign. Glad for the excuse to give their app another try, I immediately re-downloaded it from iTunes App Store. Upon opening it I was greeted with this elegantly simple What’s New page:

Unfortunately they have stuck to their brown-shtick (only so much you can do about branding), but aesthetically I’m a fan of the simple line-icons, layout and clean typography that is much more inline with the new iOS style. Tapping “Get Started” took me to their new Home screen which is perhaps the best improvement in the new app—instead of a landing page of “app” icons, I was immediately shown content in the form of a newsfeed. This is similar to the Goodreads website experience, and makes so much sense, as it is bringing the focus of the app back to social activity.

Outside of the new Home screen experience, a lot of the functionality has been simplified to focus on key interactions, but remains fundamentally the same. Previously there were five icons along the bottom,and now there are four: Home (the Newsfeed), My Books, Search, Scan, and More (which hides all the extra less-frequently-used functionality previously found on the homepage). At the top of the screen, the Messages and Updates notifications have been removed, leaving only the Search Bar. Even this is a little unnecessary, considering that there is also a Search Icon on the bottom, and I might be tempted to get rid of it, perhaps replace it with some sort of title or branding.

All in all I think this redesign has made a significant difference to the app experience. Goodreads hasn’t done anything groundbreaking or really actually exciting from a design perspective. What is exciting about it is that they’ve *finally* released a redesign that is a significant improvement over their previous app design, and they did a pretty good job with it. It has definitely increased the usefulness of the app for me, resulting in it once again earning a place in the reading section of my phone.

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Awesome Children’s Book Cover Design 2

Between my love affair with books and my life of design, I am always keeping an eye open for cool book covers. Here’s another selection of interesting children’s book covers, this time focusing on the use of unusual materials with the six Penguin Threads covers and the Hitchhiker’s Guide DIY Sticker Covers. Enjoy!

Penguin Threads:

Penguin Threads: Emma, Black Beauty, and The Secret Garden

Penguin Threads is a beautiful series of books where the cover art was created through embroidery. The first three books—Emma, Black Beauty, and The Secret Garden—were commissioned from Jillian Tamaki (read her blogpost on this project). They detail is absolutely beautiful, and I feel like sitting there and just staring at these covers for a half hour, absorbing every little thing. It’s almost a little bit overwhelming! And while I love the color palette and design, I must admit the Emma cover reminded me a little bit of Milton Glaser’s famous poster of Bob Dylan, which is an amusingly strange connection to make.

Jillian Tamaki embroidering

Penguin made an effort to make the covers as enjoyably realistic as possible by both embossing the thread design, and on the inside of the covers showing the back of the embroidery:

The Secret Garden: Interior cover with the back of the embroidery

The Penguin Threads series is described on their website: “Commissioned by award-winning Penguin art director Paul Buckley, the Penguin Threads series debuts with cover art by Jillian Tamaki for three gift-worthy Penguin Classics. Sketched out in a traditional illustrative manner, then hand stitched using needle and thread, the final covers are sculpt embossed for a tactile, textured, and beautiful book design that will appeal to the Etsy(tm)-loving world of handmade crafts.”

And for those who have already seen and loved these first three, there’s good news. Penguin has continued the series with three new titles—The Wizard of Oz, Little Women, and The Wind in the Willows—this time with embroidery illustrations by Rachell Sumpter. If anything, these compositions are even more crazily detailed; I’m still trying to decide if I think the chaos in the Little Women cover, inspired by embroidery samplers, is fantastic or too much. Despite the chaos, they are definitely still gorgeous book covers. Tempted to get the whole series!

Penguin Threads 2: The Wizard of Oz

Penguin Threads 2: Little Women

Penguin Threads 2: The Wind in the Willows

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy DIY Sticker Covers:

I first stumbled across these on Faceout Books’ great blog on the process of book design (read their post on Hitchhikers). These Hitchhiker’s covers, designed for the books’ 30th anniversary, have a simple concept: the title and author are printed at the bottom of an empty image of the universe. Inside the cover are a sheet of awesome/ridiculous stickers that relate to the book’s plots in various ways, and readers are encouraged to make a “DIY” cover by creating their own layout and design. Totally awesome. What a great way to get people, especially kids, to get excited about reading (and hopefully get hooked on a great series of books!).

As if it was needed, these DIY covers come with an added bonus. They have been incorporated into the ebook iPhone app, so for those of you into reading your books digitally, you can still have fun playing around with these awesome interactive covers. Unfortunately these seem to only be available the UK, as far as I can tell. Hopefully it will be available for American audiences soon!

Hitchhiker's iPhone app with DIY cover