Magazines Storytelling By Design Extend your print edition with digital and responsive mobile versions. Engage your audience with multimedia. 29.9.22 WORD ON THE STREET “I came to Magazine Street to see folk. For those of us who’ve been working remotely or not working at all it’s great to catch up and feel a direct connection.” Chris Phin “I love that all the people who have come to Magazine Street care about community, and they want to serve them. That inspires me.” Kilian Schalk “Nikki talked to us on 15 Minute Freelancer podcast about her experience of putting the event together, so seeing it come to life is amazing!” Louise Shanahan “Can’t wait to get home and implement these ideas!” Angela Bowcock “The speakers have been really inspiring – they have real chutzpah. I’ve found the women speakers particularly inspirational.” Jade Farquharson “This has made me want to go and start my own magazine!” Margaret Hughes “There was a brilliant theme of community throughout, and plenty of ideas I can take back and apply to what I do.” Eric Campbell “It’s made me realise how much there is to be done in magazines – it’s inspiring and intimidating!” Lauren McCarthy WORD ON THE STREET INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE CENTRE Print to Digital A CASE STUDY
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3 Inspire. Engage. Inform. Chief Design Officer, Madhav Kochunni At SITOSO, we follow a process. We follow workflows. What we pursue - creative ways to tell stories - is consistent with every project. Combining this with decades of experience in publishing, advertising, marketing, and information technology, I assure you that your design projects are in safe and reliable hands. My First Love Magazines remain my first love. My career in publishing started in the eighties when the ‘web’ was still the domain of spiders. With every twist and turn in the publishing industry, I experimented with print and digital technologies, content management platforms, software (Macromedia Flash onwards), and responsive design for multiple devices. I believe for print magazines, the way forward is to build on existing designs - design to engage the senses by crafting stories for all mediums. Focus on the content. The technologies to display your stories for all devices is revolving rapidly to match your creativity. Let us connect. Let us talk. Let us communicate the stories in your magazine to inspire, engage, and inform. I believe for print magazines, the way forward is to build on existing designs - design to engage the senses by crafting stories for all mediums. Focus on the content. The technologies to display your stories for all devices is evolving rapidly to match your creativity.
4 29.9.22 WORD ON THE STREET WORD ON THE STREET INTERNATIONAL MAGAZINE CENTRE Reprinted with kind permission from: Use of multimedia in Flipbook Use of image gallery in Flipbook Responsive design options
5 Word On The Street What’s more ... The case study features just a few of the design elements. A CASE STUDY igitizing Word On The Street magazine became a passion project. Over four weekends, many experiments went into creating two digital versions – a flip book with multimedia content and a responsive mobile version with limited scope. The case study is a snapshot of feature highlights - a flip book with multimedia and other features and a responsive version with four main feature stories. The flip book version includes a Table Of Contents, Search Features, Adding Notes To Pages, Social Sharing, Tracking With Analytics, Custom Domain, Password Protection, Videos, Audio, and Animation. Features Interactive PDF Make your PDFs come alive with interactive elements. Clean builds Build your publications including magazines, brochures, annual reports and more from the ground up and publish it for multiple mediums with existing workflows. Seamless workflows Incorporate existing processes, software and design skills to save time, money. By creating a responsive version on a content management platform (CMS) such as WordPress, your magazine opens up additional channels of revenue and engagement. Most CMSs integrate well with marketing and advertising campaign platforms, allowing drip content (teasers to capture emails) to generate leads and increase subscriptions. You can tweak content offerings based on data by embedding analytics code in both versions (flipbook and responsive) and tracking reader behaviour. Third-party or self-hosted advertising lets you offer different rate packages for subscriptions and advertising to maximize revenue. D
6 Digital Magazine Publishing Monetize Responsive Design Advertising Subscription Sponsored Content Payment Portals Marketing Customer relationship management (CRM) Email marketing Website Theme Landing pages Hosting service Page builder Seamless workflows Incorporate existing workflows, software and design skills to save time, money. Interactive Magazines Make your PDFs come alive with interactive elements. Convert your PDF documents and publications to look engaging. Clean builds Build your publications including magazines, brochures, annual reports and more from the ground up and publish it as printed materials, online flip books, and magazines. Responsive Design Thinking Think of design along with content. Think of the features and elements (interactive, multimedia) that can extend the story. The technology is available to adapt the designs for any device.
7 Flip Books Features Table of contents Google analytics Custom (own) domain Password protection Multimedia Multimedia Interactivity Video Audio Image gallery Podcasts Thumbnails Search features Add notes to pages Sharing Social media Email Charts, graphs Animation Surveys Forms Requirements PDF of the magazine Hosting platform Self hosting Third party hosting Website This process can be adopted in stages starting with the flip book, a responsive website, and integration with marketing platforms. This mind map is not exhaustive. Solutions are customized based on requirements. If you are an existing print magazine publisher, start with the flip book on a hosted platform and content management system such as Wordpress. Adding articles to the website extends this process and opens up possibilities.
8 Maximizing revenue by agazine lovers cherish getting their favourite magazine by post or at the newsstands. Unwrapping it, feeling the weight, sitting down to read it cover to cover ... this experience is real. As a designer and magazine publisher, you, too, love the design process - the creative use of fonts, colours, layout, images, pull quotes, and text only the print medium can express. You are in the right place if you have wondered about duplicating this process to a digital screen. Extending this experience Digitizing the print magazine opens up immense possibilities - additional revenue, actionable intelligence on your readers, and a higher level of engagement. Rest assured that the free-flowing internet will not destroy your design elements. Digital technologies have evolved to convert your designs into the same pixel-perfect layout. Digital Magazines There are many ways to digitize a print magazine. If you prefer the magazine to look the same way as it does in print, the current approach is to create a PDF and share it. Digitizing print magazines opens up revenue channels, gets actionable intelligence, and increases engagement. M
9 digitizing magazines Flip books are the best digital option if your resources are limited. It opens a world of possiblilities by combining design with multimedia, and interactivity. However well designed, the PDF is a non-starter in the digital world. How often have you given up after pinching and zooming through the first page of a PDF on your smartphone? Since mobile phones have a large share of all online content consumed - over 70% - sharing a PDF document is not ideal. An ideal entry-level option The next option is to create a flip book. The flip book is perhaps the best option if your resources are limited. You can easily package and export the print designs as PDFs and upload them to a CMS platform. It is still a PDF, but depending on the software platform, one can add many features. Searching for a specific text, enhancing an article with audio, video, and image galleries, creating a table of contents with links, showing thumbnails of pages, and being able to share from each page and printing a single page or the whole magazine builds engagement. This format works well for mature audiences, primarily consuming content through desk/laptops and tablets. There are many platforms which offer this service, notably issuu.com. But these platforms have limitations, and custom features can get expensive in the long run. A significant disadvantage in letting a third-party software platform host
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11 your flipbook magazine is the lack of control and lost opportunities. If you are trying to build a magazine publishing business with a strong foundation, the place to start is hosting the magazine under your brand and CMS platform. Only then will you be able to maximize your sales, marketing, and advertising channels. The second option is creating fluid or responsive designs as a parallel process for your print magazine. An existing workflow in InDesign and InCopy allows you to export text readable by most CMSs. Responsive designs Responsive designs adapt to any screen size, device, and OS platform (Mac, Windows) by automatically rearranging the layout. The basic requirements to publish a responsive magazine include a domain name (URL), a website on a hosting platform with excellent security features, a CMS, a primary theme, a theme builder, and plugins. Some of the ideal CMS platforms are WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla. WordPress, an open-source content platform, powers 43% (W3Techs, 2022) of all websites and is the best workhorse to power all your digital content. Some of the biggest companies use WordPress as their content publishing solution for blogs and articles. The flexibility in terms of design themes and plugins offered for WordPress is vast. Responsive designs adapt to any screen size and device by flowing the layout and graphics.
12 Credit for the MAC background image: PEXELS.com
13 Hybrid solutions A hybrid solution (Print + FlipBooks + Responsive) offers maximum control and flexibility and covers all readers and devices. Stage One: Extend the print designs to create a digital version (flip book) and host it on your website. You can create marketing campaigns, integrate and automate a CRM (customer relationship platform), and install analytics to gather readership behaviour. Offer print and flip book versions separately. The flip book version could be offered as an add-on as well. Stage Two: A responsive edition is the major piece in your publishing strategy. By adopting a hybrid approach, you can play off the strengths of each format and medium. Depending on the content, the printed edition can be a skinny option. Show more content in the digital versions. On the printed edition, QR codes can direct the reader to more content in the digital versions. Create dynamic and interactive ADs in digital versions. This enhancement will invite a different set of advertisers and an enhanced AD pricing option. Animation, interactive stories, audio, video, and charts will increase interest and engagement and help build a loyal audience. A hybrid solution offers the maximum control and flexibility.
Engage your readers Talk to us to design engaging content ... magazines, websites Remarkable stories. Responsive designs. www.sitoso.com
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