About

Pixellation is a retro gaming eBookzine for eReaders with articles, features, reviews & much more, & is currently available from the Amazon Kindle bookstore.

About Pixellation

The idea behind Pixellation came from the fact that, after purchasing an Amazon Kindle, and looking for some books for it on the subject of gaming (of which there are many great ones to read,) I noticed that there wasn’t any gaming magazines for the device on the Kindle bookstore, which I thought was a real shame as the Kindle is a really great powerful reading device. There were however many books on gaming, but no actual magazine style gaming eBooks (eBookzines), so I thought I would change this and start Pixellation, a retro gaming eBookzine that focussed on many different games and systems from across the ages.

Aims & Goals with Pixellation

My aims & goals for the mag are first and foremost to make the writing as good as possible, to make every article in Pixellation no matter how big or small as fun, informative, fresh and presentable as possible. One thing I want is for the writing to be as much of a fun and enjoyable read for the readers as possible; otherwise, what’s the point? There is no reason why, when writing a topical article or review, I can’t inject some subtle humour and fun into a piece from time to time when it fits, and I hope that if I have fun with my writing then hopefully people will find it fun to read. So as a rule, I want to engage the reader with a well written article that’s a fun informative read.

My other aims and goals with Pixellation are to make the editing, design and layout of the mag as close to magazine-like as possible on eReaders. This of course poses a huge challenge, as space is at a premium and because eReader’s are significantly different to other media devices, such as tablet’s, smart phones, notebooks etc. But I like a good challenge and will continue to improve each issue.
Goals

• To write well written and presented fun and informative articles.
• To shine a light on as many undiscovered games as possible, and games that dont get the same amount (if any at all) of fan-fair as more well known and much coverted games.
• To make Pixellation as close to a magazine in in appearence, presentation, layout and design as possible on an eReader's and tablets.
• To grow Pixellation and make it bigger and better with each issue.

More on creating Pixellation Issue 1

Here you will find more information explaining what Pixellation is all about, how i put the ebookzine together and my aims and goals.

This is the 3rd and final version of this bookzine; I have re-edited each and every article in here, refined the layout and added more detail, why? Well, in my rush and excitement to get the bookzine finished and uploaded to the Kindle store, I didn’t do as much testing as I should have, to make sure everything looked right on the Kindle and perfectly readable. The main issue was with the size of the font, it was way too small, so after listening to feedback and advice, I decided to re-edit Pixellation and address this glaring issue.

With most Kindle books, you can adjust the size of the font on your Kindle if the size is not to your liking, this is done by pressing the AA button, at least on the Kindle 3. Some Kindle books however, are not able to do this, the size of the font is set and you will be unable to adjust the size, this is due to the way in which the book is put together and the programs used to do so. You will find this with most, if not all of the manga and graphic novels on the Kindle store.

As with this bookzine, because of the way in which I have put Pixellation together and the programs I have used, the font is at a set size and cannot be adjusted. This is unfortunate, but after a lot of testing, I decided that to keep the layout I wanted, it was worth it. I didn’t want a plain layout for this bookzine, with maybe one or two pictures or screenshots in either corner of the page; I want Pixellation to have more of a magazine style layout as much as possible, to keep things fun and interesting. This of course poses a considerable challenge, with the constraints of the size of the Kindles screen, trying to keep everything readable with an interesting layout is very challenging.

It’s worth mentioning though that I did edit the bookzine together in a way in which would let the reader adjust the size of the font if they preferred, but this caused some undesired issues. I found that adjusting the font size would bump any and all pictures onto another page, which could mean that the next page might consist of just one or more picture on there own, with no test at all. This meant that the layout throughout Pixellation would be lost, something which I did not want, and it even made the articles confusing to read, so inevitably, I decided to go with a fixed, much larger font.

In the end, with more testing and reworking, I settled on two main fonts for the main body of text throughout Pixellation, and these were chosen because they were bold and easy on the eyes. I have also settled on a much bigger, and now perfectly readable font size than was previously used in the first version of Pixellation. The size of the font is now slightly bigger than the default font size set on the Kindle, that is to say, the lowest font size used as standared by the Kindle. With better font used and at a much bigger size, Pixellation is now an easy and comfortable bookzine to read than it was before.