First off, thanks for reading 29 Days of August over the course of the last month. It has been very pleasurable to develop and produce this project, and seeing readers return day-after-day was immensely gratifying–particularly those of you confronting Hurricane Irene on the East Coast this past weekend.

Before I allow you to wander off and read something else, I wanted to take a moment to describe the  philosophy behind the project and to ask for a little bit of help.

I designed 29 Days of August as an experiment in reading within new technology platforms. The entirety of the piece was available in daily installments within the feeds of major social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr) as well as via email. Twitter’s 140 character limit for posts resulted in the breathless, abbreviated voice of the two narrators, and the fact that they didn’t limit themselves to single tweets was an attempt to modulate the Attention Deficit Disorder-driven velocity of this medium.

In addition, the writing took inspiration from two contemporary trends in video game design. First, each day’s post was ‘bite size’, consumable in a matter of minutes. Second, each post was associated with one or more ‘rewards’ that ranged from sex to theft to love to flight. A deeper narrative linked all the content.

My illustration partner, Suzanna Schlemm, and I started working on 29 Days of August at the beginning of the summer. I didn’t complete the final post until 45 minutes before it was distributed yesterday.

Whether you read the entire piece or only a single installment, I’d love to have your feedback on any of the following topics: Narrative, user experience, design, illustration, technology. You’re welcome to add a comment in this post below or drop me an email at jwt@oro-design.com.

Regards and thanks for being part of this experience!

JWTY

This video gives a brief view of what we’re trying to do and how we’re doing it.

Enjoy!

29 Days of August from 29DaysofAugust on Vimeo.

A new site architecture will be in place tomorrow (Wednesday, August 10th) that will allow you to read 29 Days of August chronologically. Great for any of you who are coming into this experience late. It will look something like this:

If you’re coming a few days late to this experience, you can click on the “read me” link to get the entire text.

Thanks for your patience!

We’re been focusing on how to provide the best experience for this across multiple channels and have been focused particularly on tweaking the facebook experience.

August 1 was like this:

A series of posts flooding into anyone’s FB feed that liked ’29 Days of August’. Cool, but a little spammy.

We changed the format to be a single post, with the content in-line as comments.

August 2 was like this:

It’s resulted in a hit on our impression #s with Facebook, but we believe that those who are seeing the posts are actually reading them (as opposed to scanning over).

Let us know if you think this is an improved reading experience.

Thx!