This chapter looked at DVD design from two perspectives: first reviewing design guides based on how DVDs are used and viewed (imposed constraints), and then breaking free of assumed limitations by exploring the possibilities for exploiting the available capabilities of DVDs to add some additional spark and fun.

The DVD-Video specification provides wonderful tools for creating presentations with user-guided navigation. And the navigation can be controlled with a simple remote control interface, thanks to menus with buttons and interactive highlights. However, how these capabilities are actually used to create an interface to the DVD is totally under your control as the DVD author. There is no official specification for the design of a DVD interface. Instead, the industry has developed some common conventions such as chapter index menus, and typical approaches for button sizes, layouts, and highlighting.

If the purpose of your DVDs is to share and communicate with others, it certainly makes sense to be aware of these issues in designing your DVDs, and to follow the interface design conventions that your viewers have learned to expect from commercial DVDs. Especially when designing for a mass audience, inexperienced viewers, or professional and corporate markets, take care to have legible text, clearly distinguished menu buttons, and straightforward and intuitive navigation paths.

However, all these boring guidelines and conventions do not need to crimp your creativity, for you can still take advantage of the possibilities of the DVD specification to distinguish your designs, especially in the look and interactivity of the menu buttons and highlighting. Plus, you can go beyond straightforward playback to create elements such as karaoke audio playback, informational slide shows, and self-running kiosk presentations, or even add Easter eggs and other hidden content.

In this way, you can create discs that provide a conventional interface for standard playback, plus include additional content or playback modes that are accessed by those who know the secret mechanism. These can range from simple bonus clips to annotate various segments of the disc, to an entire movie or subhierarchy of menus of additional content.

Of course, if you are designing for a creative or special audience, all bets are off, and you can flout all the conventions you want.

In any case, it’s your production, your video, your content that you want to share. With Adobe Encore DVD, you can use your material to design both effective and interesting DVD productions. And, with some additional effort in Adobe Photoshop and other related tools, you can build your own library of design elements to help efficiently create groups of related discs. Then have fun creating DVDs!