Screen Turners
How to adapt your printed collateral for a virtual world.
There’s something about old-fashioned print – the feel of a weighty stock passing through your fingers, the smell of ink, the touch of texture. But in a COVID-19 world, print is becoming impractical. As students and workers are logging in to virtual classrooms and meetings, and adapting to virtual meetups, print is getting cut, or at least shelved temporarily.
But all that hard work doesn’t have to be lost. With Adobe Acrobat®, you can still share your analog communications digitally and even enhance them with interactivity. Here are a few tips:
BASIC: Hyperlinks and Crosslinks
One thing we love about big books or documents is the ability to quickly thumb from section to section. Online, this can be tedious if you have to scroll or click page by page. We produce digital Annual Reports for several clients including Luther Burbank Center for the Performing Arts and incorporate this feature. Using interactive features within Adobe InDesign®, you can create a master menu (similar to a website) allowing readers to navigate between sections from any page in the document. You can also hyperlink references and other information within your text, allowing viewers to access web pages within your site and beyond.
NEXT LEVEL: Screen Flipping
Each year we produce Syngenta Flowers’ Annuals catalog. This year, the print catalog was augmented with a digital version, expanding the reach while still providing the same design and experience. Using various plugins that allow you to embed an interactive PDF online, the team incorporated FlippingBook to emulate the linear page-turning experience you have with print, but in a virtual world. This type of solution not only adds flexibility, but combined with print-on-demand technology, can substantially reduce production costs for traditional print projects.
EXPERT: Interactive with Motion
The San Francisco 49ers EDU offers a STEAM curriculum program for K-8th grades. Schipper helped develop the printed playbook which is an integral part of school field trips to the 49ers Museum. However, with school cancellations and shelter-in-place orders, field trips are not currently an option. The 49ers sought a quick online solution that teachers and parents can use. Tapping into all the interactive capabilities Adobe InDesign® has to offer, we reassembled the book with animations to activate pages, crosslinks, and buttons to get students to interact with questions and activities, including a crossword puzzle. Check it out for yourself!
If you need assistance transforming your print project into an interactive, digital experience, Waltz is available to help! Email us to set up a free Zoom consultation for your project needs.
How we can help
- Digitizing collateral into interactive PDFs
- Creating virtual campaigns via e-blasts, webinars, etc.
- Refreshing brand systems