Everyone likes a good story and nothing beats a good story than a well design and illustrated paged. This is why in this edition of Awesome Web Design of the Week we are going to check out Epic Magazine’s haunting and amazing feature Into the Zombie Underworld.
Essentially a good story is comprised of characters the readers can attach themselves to, a stunning story line that will put the readers on edge and keep them reading on. The same goes for an awesome web design and in graphic design as a whole. In this post we are going to talk about the marriage of the written word and imagery.
Epic Magazine is a non-fiction publication that collects amazing stories around the world. Epic Magazine is headed by Joshua Davis and Joshuah Bearman who both have editorial and publishing backgrounds. As of this writing the online magazine currently has 5 titles and one of which is available for reading in Medium.
Into the Zombie Underworld is written by Mischa Berlinski and was originally published in Men’s Journal. The site is designed by San Francisco based digital studio Upperquad. The amazing photography was done by New York based photographer Ben Lowy, while the illustrations are made by Jane Kim and Ariana Nicolay.
The design and layout of Into the Zombie Underworld may not be as fancy as Pitchfork’s Daft Punk article we have featured before, it sure beats it in terms of responsiveness and readability not to mention loading times as well.
Design wise Into the Zombie Underworld is the best example of how imagery, design and words are combined to create something amazing. The typeface as well as the accompanying illustration already gives the viewer the ominous feel. The body typeface looks like as if it was inspired by a noir movie. The accompanying visuals further illustrates the dark and unsettling tone of the story.
The website utilizes Creatavist which is an online publisher that makes multimedia stories for apps, ebooks and browsers as well. As of this writing Creatavist is at it’s beta stages but they are currently offering free and paid services for people to choose from. The navigation for Into the Zombie Underworld is quite simple, one can breeze through chapters by clicking parts of the line on top of the page which corresponds to the different chapters of the story. The website uses a simple parallax scroll to run through the whole story. Combined with the site’s responsiveness it is perfect consumption for small devices such as tablets or smartphones. Reading the feature on the desktop is amazing specially in a big monitor.
It may not have the best visuals and coding prowess but the site itself is a showcase of the perfect marriage between an amazing story and impeccable visual design as it accompanies the gripping tale of Nadathe. If you guys would like to know or read more titles from Epic Magazine just head for the jump.
What do you guys think? Share your thoughts about this article? And if you guys have read Into the Zombie Underworld what is your opinion about the Haitian concept of Zombies? Do tell us your thoughts at the comments below.