Making a Printed Pamphlet Interactive
This past week, I had a goal of creating an exciting, interactive pamphlet using AR with Zapworks. I chose to center it on Voldemort’s horcruxes from the Harry Potter series. If you don’t know what a horcrux is, you should keep reading and check out the pamphlet!
I began by sketching out my idea for the pamphlet. I wanted to cover all of the horcruxes that Voldemort created and give a bit more background info on horcruxes in general. Here’s the original outline:
Once you open the cover, the first page will fill in the reader on what a horcrux is and a bit of the history behind horcruxes. The Zapworks code would lead to a website that goes more into detail on horcruxes. The back page would dive into the key steps that led to the fall of He Who Must Not Be Named with a Zapworks code leading to a video of Voldemort being destroyed Then, of course, there is the cover on the right.
On the inner fold, I planned to have an image of Voldemort with all of his horcruxes surrounding him with information on each one. I didn’t have a plan for evey Zapworks code in the sketch above yet, but I did plan on a photo gallery and a short trivia quiz at least.
I eventually decided to just stick to the four zapworks codes that I explained above for the whole pamphlet in order to not overload it with too many codes.
After I finished the outline I created a very simple style guide with the fonts and colors I intended to use.
At first, I intended to use Zapworks as an introduction to AR, but after some issues getting free access through UVU, I settled for QR codes using qr-code-generator.com. Because of this, I had to change my plans a bit, but what’s a project without a pivot or two? It’s also not AR, but it still made this pamphlet a lot more exciting.
When creating the pamphlet in inDesign, I ran into a few more issues that I’ll go into as we take a look at the final version of the pamphlet.
The QR code under “What is a Horcrux?” leads to a fandom website that goes more into detail on horcruxes. The one on the back leads to Amazon. I changed the back because it was too text-heavy, so I decided that a good use of the back would be to send users to where they could buy the Harry Potter books and read the whole story.
Once again, the text took up a lot of space, so I decided to have the QR code in the bottom left lead to a photo gallery of all the horcruxes with the stories behind each one. Because I changed the QR code on the back of the pamphlet to the Amazon link, I thought I would use a video clip of young Voldemort learning about horcruxes. I also decided to do this because I was no longer able to make a quiz without Zapworks.
The final pamphlet didn’t turn out too different from the original idea, but there were some pivots I had to make along the way. First, it was the change from Zapworks to QR codes which led to some changes of what I could do with the QR codes. I also had to change up some of the content due to the lack of space, but even Even with these challenges, I feel that the pamphlet was still a success. I was able to take a physical pamphlet and make it much more interactive and exciting by adding digital elements. The digital elements not only added value by providing more information, but it could be done in a fun way.
Thanks for reading! If you like my work, reach out. I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on LinkedIn.
