Explore the process of enhancing interactive design in your digital projects, specifically in creating and modifying navigation arrows and object states. This article provides a step-by-step guide on how to effectively incorporate these elements into your design, from choosing the right images to implementing buttons and forms.
Key Insights
- The article demonstrates how to add more object states to your project, by selecting the first object state, creating a new one, and customizing it with a new image from the CC libraries. These object states can be seamlessly transitioned through.
- The article also walks you through the creation of modern, customizable button shapes using basic design tools, such as the pen tool. This includes the process of making the arrow shape, scaling and modifying it, and transforming it into a functional button that can guide user interaction.
- In addition to creating new buttons, the article instructs on how to modify existing buttons in terms of color, opacity, and positioning, to ensure they match the overall design and don't overpower the images. The buttons can be assigned functions such as navigating to the next or previous state, enhancing the interactivity of your design.
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In this video, we're going to be working with our Object State a little bit more, as well as working with our button. So to begin, let's start by adding a third Object State. To do this, we can select our first Object State, and we'll go into Object States and simply add one more by clicking Create New Object State. From here, we've made a copy of our first, so let's simply rename it "State 3" and hit ENTER. Finally, let's drag it to the bottom—we'll click and drag it below. With State 3 selected, now let's select our image frame, and hitting A will select our image itself. We'll then hit the Delete key, and we now need to add our new image. To do this, we'll go to our CC Libraries, and feel free to again choose another image. In this case, I think I'm going to add this image here. I'll click and drag it in, and right-click, selecting Fitting and Fill Frame Proportionally. This looks good—I'll drag it up a little bit, and I like the look of this. Finally, let's preview our work here by hitting Play. Again, we'll want to make sure that we can transition through each of these—and this works well.
Next, I'm currently not very excited about this button here. While we could select it and maybe change the color of it—selecting our Fill color and changing it to Paper—it looks slightly better, but overall I don't really like the design of this arrow. Instead, I think we might be a little better off creating our own. So let's utilize our Selection Tool, and we're simply going to delete it using the Delete key. Next, let's create our own button using the Pen Tool. I'll hit W on the keyboard so we can again see our guides, and let's go over to our Pen Tool. From here, we're simply going to make a very basic arrow.
We're essentially going to create an arrow here within this section. However, first we need a guide, so let's drag from our top ruler, and holding Shift, we'll put it right in the middle at 300 pixels and release. Next, let's create our actual shape. We'll start at the top intersection and create our first anchor point. Next, we'll select the intersection right at these two guides in the middle, and on the bottom here, we'll create a third anchor point. So right now we have the makings of a triangle. But let's simply drag somewhere here and create another anchor point right in the middle along this horizontal guide. We'll then complete the shape, which we'll see with the circle right next to the Pen cursor. We've now completed our entire shape. We can then change the stroke and fill to black, and we have something that looks like a more modern arrow. However, in this case, it's a little too big.
So let's select it, and holding Shift, we're going to drag it down to the right and scale it down a bit more. If you'd like to continue modifying your shape, feel free to expand it or reduce it and change it however you'd prefer. You can also right-click on it. If we go to the top to Transform, we can scale it, rotate it, shear, or do whatever we'd prefer to modify. Once you're happy with your arrow, feel free to drag it wherever you'd prefer. For me, I'm going to line it up with the right-hand side and, holding Shift, just bump it to the left with the left arrow key. From here, we now have our new arrow shape, but we need to assign it as a button. To do this, with our arrow selected, we'll go over to Buttons and Forms, and we're going to select the type for the shape. In this case, we'll select Button. As we see here, we can create almost anything into a button. We'll then give it a name—triple-clicking and typing "Right Button." Next, we'll make sure that "On Click" is selected for the event, and we need to read our action. In this case, the action is "Go to Next State." From here, let's preview our work—going down to EPUB Interactivity and hitting Play. Once it's loaded, we'll see that we have our new arrow and can go through each of these Object States.
While we currently have a right arrow, we also want to have an arrow to go back. Even though we only have three states, it may not be that important since you can simply click twice more. But if you have 50 different images that you're cycling through, it may be more important to be able to go back with just one arrow. So let's create an arrow that goes back and to the left. To do this, we'll simply click on our arrow and hit CTRL + C to copy it. Then, if we hit CTRL + V on the keyboard, we can paste it. We'll drag it all the way over to the left-hand side so it's flush with the left-hand side of our image. Let's hold Shift and bump it over to the right. Next, we're going to rotate this arrow. We can do this either by dragging from the corner or right-clicking, going to Transform, and selecting Rotate—or easier, Rotate 180 Degrees. We'll click, and there we'll see that the arrow has been rotated. However, when we do it in this fashion, we'll see it's actually been rotated from the bottom-left corner. We'll need to simply drag it back up to the top, hold Shift, and hit the right arrow.
Next, we need to reassign this button. We go to our Buttons and Forms. We'll see that "On Click" currently has no action. We'll click our Actions, and rather than going to the next state, we're going to go to the previous state. With this assigned, let's give our button a new name. We'll title it "Left Button" and hit ENTER. Finally, we'll see a preview and hit Play. From here, we can click to the right, and if we click our left button, we can go back. We've now successfully created our buttons.
However, these black buttons—while they match the color—tend to be a little bold on the rest of these images. So let's work with the opacity and color of these buttons. To do this, we'll select both of them: selecting one with the Selection Tool and holding Shift to select the other. We'll then go to the top to our Fill and let's change them to white.
It's a little bit less bold. Let's also change the opacity. We can do this in our control bar. We'll see the opacity is currently set to 100%. Let's double-click this and change it to 60, then hit ENTER. Here, we'll see that they're a bit more faded. If we hit W, we'll see that they stand out a little bit less. If we click outside, you've got to like the look of this a bit more. However, feel free to change the opacity to whatever you'd prefer. We can preview this with different Object States. Since this is the first state that we'll see, I think these stand out to show our attention. In the second two states, they may not be quite as bold, but the viewer will know that they're there from the first state. So, let's preview all of this together—hitting the Clear Preview and Play—and we can see from this that we're able to successfully rotate between our different Object States, and we have our text on the right-hand side. Well done! Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard now to save our work, and in the next video, we're going to begin working on our third page. See you there.