How to visualize the beauty of books? Here’s a new amazing example of how amazingly this task can be accomplished.
Christian Swineheart, interactive designer with one of the most impressive visualization portfolios, has grown up with choose-your-own-adventure books.
A lot of what I read in those days served a similar purpose. A narrative was all well and good, but more interesting to me were the books that laid out a set of places and situations that could outlive their attendant plots – stories that provided scaffolding for my own imagining.
On a basic level, CYOA book is a collection of numbered pages. Most of them tell a part of the story, and at the end they ask you to jump to another part – usually giving a few options to pick up from.
Swineheart grouped these endings based on two factors: the number of choices given, and the goodness of the ending. To visualize this, he applied color-coding to every page of the book, and then laid pages out next to each other.
12 books are visualized. The earliest comes from 1979, but most of the books are from the 80s.
Here you’ see just a teaser of the beauty of CYOA visualizations. You should visit the original post to see all 12 books analyzed in detail – and with interactive elements.
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