How to save time and money by integrating content across print, website, and apps.

The fine print

The traditional process is to have different workflows to tackle designing for print, website, and apps. This can be combined to create a cohesive workflow process reducing the resources to one third. There are multiple ways to approach this. One way is to start the process with the content for the print magazine, brochure, or annual report. While writers and editors continue with their process designers can start laying out the publication in parallel. 

Online magazine

The same publication can be converted to an online version with a highly responsive design and features including search, font size, table of contents, bookmarking, and more.

Responsive app content

Content from print and websites can also be repurposed to publish to an app. While publications now are exported as a PDF that is unreadable on a smart phone, there are ways to accomplish this.

Advertising 

Ads on website and the app can be made interactive and include podcasts and video.

Background

The Integrated Publishing solution was the result of the ‘Zero Print’ initiative. From the beginning it was designed to enhance customer experience, considerably reduce development time, publish multiple formats for the mobile platform, and complement existing content (marketing resources, materials and communications) and in some cases replace it.

The customer had already moved from traditional devices to the mobile platform. Marketing needed to engage them quickly and effectively. Existing content, in the form of clunky websites, presentations and learning (PowerPoint, BrainShark, Learning and training) modules, were fragmented and did not render well on smaller screens.

Existing PDFs also were not responsive on small devices; the websites were not optimised for that segment. Marketing was required to generate content in a form that is adaptable to a large number of devices and platforms. There was no one solution for all. Perhaps a combination of HTML5, ePUB, and Adobe DPS would have worked admirably.

In the existing scenario, marketing messages were pushed out at least once weekly by email. Analytics proved that it ended up in junk mail; the recipient chose to ignore it; if they did click on the link(s) from mobile devices, they did not render properly; and if the link was a PDF, they were not readable on a small screen.