The rise of online PDF magazines has opened the medium up to a whole new market. All you need to benefit from the trend is a computer, a target audience and top-end design team.
By Olivier Schildt
A quiet revolution is taking place on the internet that has the potential to shake up the magazine industry. The design of spectacular free online PDF magazines has the potential to give the printed versions a serious run for their money – and they’re becoming more popular, more prolific and more accessible to the general public.
The potential to create PDF magazines has been around for as long as PDFs themselves, but the concept has never really taken off until quite recently. The reasons for this are diverse and many of them still apply. People like to touch and feel the glossy pages of a magazine, to take it with them from one room to the next, to spend time pouring over the pages. For a long time, this ‘tangibility factor’ has been the printed magazine’s biggest differentiator and perhaps the key reasons for the fact that online versions have never really taken off. In addition, online screen PDFs of magazine pages do not translate nearly as well as their printed version. There’s way too much copy and the images simply do not have the impact that they do in hardcopy.
But one of the new-generation PDF magazine’s strengths lies in precisely the fact that it does not try to compete with the printed version’s unique tangibility. The best PDF magazines are not simply an online equivalent of the printed version – they stand on their own as a unique and quite different medium. The layout is entirely different, with reduced copy length, an increase in font size and far larger images. Indeed, PDF magazines work best when they are designed as such from the word go, instead of being adapted from existing print copies.
However, it’s not only in their layout that PDF magazines are different. They offer a diverse range of advantages, for publishing companies as well as SMEs and corporates. The most obvious advantage lies in cost. Printing makes up by far the most significant portion of magazine production costs and in most cases, it’s the large print bill that necessitates the need for advertising. Without the print overheads, anyone can produce a PDF magazine and distribute it online for free – to online communities, clients, prospective customers or even staff. PDF mags open up the magazine medium to people and organisations who have hitherto been precluded by high print costs from producing a print publication. With PDF magazines, companies can create online product brochures, organisations can reduce the cost of their internal staff magazines and existing magazine publishers can tap into a whole new market of online users with titles that target specific groups and lifestyle interests.
Moreover, no printing costs means that your budget can be spent on top-end photographers and writers, thereby improving the content and aesthetic of your publication. And what you can do online extends far beyond anything you can do on the printed page when it comes to applications. The options are almost limitless. Importantly, various flash applications can mimic the feel and experience of reading a print publication, allowing the reader to turn the page and thereby lending the publication a sense of sequence. Readers can also click through directly from the PDF mag page to online competitions, surveys, other websites, blogs and form fields; advertisers (if you wish to use them) can insert television adverts into magazine pages and music stores could include music video and audio clips.
PDF magazines are also completely searchable and, as an added bonus, can be used by companies as an example of their commitment to environmental sustainability (no harmful inks, no cutting down trees for paper). Lead times are also shorter and because the publication doesn’t need to go to print, the design team can update and change content right up until the live online publication.
Finally, on the internet these publications have the capacity to reach a far wider and ever-growing digital audience. The growing number of high-speed band width users and technological advancements that allow for larger screens with better colours and resolution mean that PDF magazines are more accessibly to the general public than ever before. But capturing this digitally-sophisticated audience means doing it properly. Its worth repeating that PDF magazines are far more than simply online versions of an existing print publication, and organisations who dump print mag PDF layouts online will be missing a trick. In a sense, PDF magazines need to replace the tangibility factor of print magazines with a stunning aesthetic and top-end content – this is their key differentiator. As such their design, look-and-feel, layout and usability all need to be carefully considered by a skilled design team with in-depth understanding not only of your business and how best to communicate to your audience, but also of the online environment as a communication medium.