The Fortune Cookie Book

I was assigned with the task of creating a book with a unique twist. My first thoughts of a book is that it is an experience. My goal was to combine books and fortune cookies together, into bite sized stories, a unique experience. The fortunes sometimes grab your attention long enough for you to just wonder about its meaning, but you are always left hanging on for more. In addition to this idea, you have all of these photos buried away in your camera roll that nobody else has seen or would even understand the story that comes with it. The inspiration was to combine the short story of a fortune, and expand it with photos.

How The Fortune Cookie Book will work

I collected a bunch of stories and photos from my friends and classmates, to create a limited printed version of these stories and have them placed into fortune cookies. One side of the fortune will have a small snip of the story, and on the opposite side will have a QR Code to the rest of the story and photo, which would be hosted online.

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The Process

I started out asking around for submissions of photos and the stories that go with it, and received a good handful. Once compiled, I picked a short quote from each person's story, and formatted it onto a fortune cookie sized paper, with the appropriate typography to mimic the originals. Afterwards, I created the website that would host the remaining story and photos, using HTML5 and CSS. Generated a QR link for each story and placed it with the associated fortune and prepared them for print. Purchased a couple of fortune cookies, removed their original contents and swapped them out for my stories, and filmed the final process.

The Storytellers

The Fortune Cookie Book is comprised of photos and fortunes all submitted by my friends: Alessandra, Ana, Angela, Brian, Connor, Elizabeth, Giulio, Greg, Jackson, Jeanne, Josiane, Julia, Kirollos, Lina, Manami, Patrick, Raphael, Rebecca, Serrena, Simon, Sophia, Tatiana, Tim, and myself.

Technical Information

For this project, I used a mixture of applications from the Adobe Creative cloud like InDesign, Photoshop, and Premiere. I also coded the website by hand with HTML5, and CSS elements using a text editor, Atom.io.

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