Adobe Digital Publishing

Are you curious to learn how other publishers and business use DPS to transform their businesses? Do you want to see examples of a custom HTML store, iPhone publishing, and creative use of overlays all in one place? Download the Adobe & Digital Publishing app now on your iPad.

Some featured items:

• Reader’s Digest uses custom, in-app stores, allowing readers to shop for more products and services without leaving the app
• Embedded videos in trade publications provide effective and engaging product detailing
• Men’s Health publishes to iPhone to reach a broader, highly connected audience
• Backpacker uses social sharing to allow its brand ambassadors to spread the word about great content
• National Geographic uses Adaptive Design Tools to publish to iPad and Kindle Fire

Download the app from the iTunes store today. Let us know your favorite features of the app. Or you can simply vote with your fingers! We will use the analytics built into Digital Publishing Suite to see which features are most popular.

• Download the Adobe & Digital Publishing app from iTunes.
• View other great apps built by Adobe, including Adobe Inspire, Adobe SWAPP, and DPS Tips.

On November 14, 2012, Adobe will host a dinner for IMAG members at the conference in Boulder, Colorado. After a day of scintillating conversation rife with best practices and debates, Gerald Farro, Business Development in Digital Publishing will sit down with independent publishers to discuss business opportunities provided by Digital Publishing Suite.

If you are attending IMAG Boulder, tell the MPA team that you would like to join us for dinner.

Visit the IMAG Boulder site to register for the conference and dinner.

It is exciting to see a surge in iPhone publications built with Digital Publishing Suite. With millions of iPhone viewers, publishers are seeing an opportunity to reach more readers. National Geographic has quickly adapted its print publication for the iPad, Kindle Fire HD, and now the iPhone.

National Geographic is renowned for its photography, and the images are vibrant on the high definition back-lit iPhone screen. The audio and video are crystal clear, allowing National Geographic to tell a rich multimedia story.

In the last few months we have noticed that DPS customers who launch apps on the iPhone in addition to the iPad are seeing an immediate 25% increase in downloads over the iPad volume. Our goal at Adobe is to help publishers grow their audience, and being readily available on their readers’ preferred devices is key to helping them grow.

Every time I have spoken with a publisher about creating content for the iPhone, the user interface is noted as the biggest challenge. The New Yorker, Women’s Health and Men’s Health have tackled this issue and built great user interface designs that are intuitive and easy to navigate on a small screen. National Geographic, assisted by Joe Zeff Design, created a clean Table of Contents. Each article is divided into up to four sections: Read, Look, Watch and Listen. This showcases National Geographic’s capability of creating and communicating a multimedia story for its loyal following.

• Download the National Geographic app on the iTunes Store and let us know what you think!
• Read Folio’s article, “National Geographic Launches Magazine on the iPhone.”

By Teresa Demel

Rodale Publishing has established itself as a leader in designing magazines for the small screen. They have already launched Men’s Health, Women’s Health, and Best Life on the iPhone, showing their commitment to being widely available to readers across some of the most popular devices.

This app of the week video compares the iPad and iPhone versions side-by-side, so that you can see for yourself how they adapted the layout to include the same great content on a smaller screen. The difference in layout is not just based on size, but also on use case. When people are reading content on the iPhone, they are looking for smaller bits of “snackable” information. The layout allows readers to scan across articles, and then read more deeply about an eye-catching topic.

Careful Balance of Images and Text
As a general rule, Rodale uses a minimalist approach to page layout on the iPhone. Readers will either see text or images on the pages, but will rarely see both. As an example, this video shows a how-to article on the Sun Salutation yoga pose. The iPad article shows all 10 poses on a single page, with the description text adjacent to the images. On the iPhone, this layout would be completely illegible. Rodale redesigned it so that readers can either toggle between the poses, and then click on a button to open up the description. This is incredibly clear and allows readers to focus their attention on one thing at a time.

Color Coding Cues
The DPS-based Table of Contents is color coded to delineate between sections.

• Style & Beauty – Yellow
• Fitness – Blue
• Food – Green

This color coding is not just in the icons, but also on the article pages. When I’m reading a print magazine, I can tell where I am based on the page numbers and the footer of the publication. As an iPhone reader, where real estate is smaller, the color frames are clues for where I am in the context of the larger magazine.

While the following app of the week video outlines a few tricks used by Rodale, download the Women’s Health app from iTunes to experience more methods for conveying information on a small screen.

Watch the Women’s Health app of the week video