Xótica is a Literary Digital Magazine focused on the culture of different countries. Every issue focuses on a particular country or culture, offering news and articles about it. The design changes every time, to match the features of the culture that is presented.
Xótica is known for publishing an interactive story in each issue.
For this issue we created an interactive design for Haruki Murakami’s story “The rise and fall of Sharpie cakes”, or “Los Conitos” in Spanish. The main character is a man who takes part in a pastry company’s contest to prepare the “new cake of the contemporary age”. The jury are talking crows who only eat this product. If they eat his cake, he will be the winner of 2,000,000 yen, if not, he will have lost.
In the preface to “Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman”, Murakami explains that the story collects his impressions about the literary world in form of a fable.
Navigating Xótica magazine is simple and follows the line of other digital magazines such as “Wired Magazine,” “Esquire” and “Times”. There are some additions, like icons for favorite books and readers.
The logic is simple: to navigate between notes you must swipe right, and to continue reading the note you swipe down. For the interactive story, the same logic is used.
