Adobe Digital Publishing

Digital Publishing Suite is not just for magazines. Corporations are embracing the technology to create digital catalogs, event apps, and sales tools to reach both internal stakeholders and customers. The possibilities are endless! Check out the new Adobe Digital Publishing sessions at MAX designed for corporations interested in efficiently expanding into the mobile space using InDesign resources! Sign up now to reserve your seat in the sessions below:

Engaging Your Customers and Employees with Mobile Apps

Day/Time: Tuesday, 8:30 AM – 511A

Session ID: S7824

Presenters: Brooke Entsminger (Lung LLC), Christian Russo (Sotheby’s International Realty), Jose Andrade (Publicis Life Brands Medicus)

Description:

• Learn to drive customer and employee engagement through digital publications on tablets and smartphones from top corporations/agencies.
• View examples of compelling brand loyalty, merchandising, customer communications, sales enablement, and retail catalog applications.
• Explore insights from deep analytics to deliver content that encourages customers and employees to engage with your brand and content.

New York, we’re coming your way! Join the Digital Publishing Suite team and The Association of Magazine Media (MPA) in New York on April 2^nd to learn what’s new and relevant for your digital publishing business.

Zeke Koch, Senior Director of Product Management for Digital Publishing Suite, will explore the latest release and even share some juicy details about what else the team is working on. You’ll also get a taste of what Adobe Analytics, the analytics service in DPS, has to offer. Educate yourself to leverage these tools and make the best editorial, design and business decisions for your organization.

Looking to gear up with the best tools and insights to run your digital publishing business? We’ll show you how. New York, New York: see you April 2^nd!

Event Information:
Tuesday – April 2^nd, 2013
MPA Board Room
810 Seventh Avenue, 24th Floor 12noon – 2pm
New York, NY 10019

Get the details and register here!

By Teresa Demel

MaraMedia uses Adobe Digital Publishing Suite to build educational digital manuals for students in grades 7-9. With a goal of supporting active participation in students’ education, MaraMedia provides opportunities for interaction with learning material, from acquiring new information to ultimately applying that information to the real world.

My past career was in education, and I have been curious to see how educational institutions and publishers will embrace Digital Publishing Suite. Printed textbooks appeal to one learning style, but interactivity in a publication allows kinesthetic and auditory learners to consume and apply new information with ease. As an added bonus, having all textbooks on one iPad certainly lightens the backpack.

Some great Digital Publishing techniques employed by MaraMedia:

• Students can actively break down the steps of a process by tapping on buttons and viewing slideshows of instructions.
• Readers tap on thumbnails of artwork to zoom into a larger image and learn more.
• Navigating among modules is intuitive with a clear organizational hierarchy. Nav-to buttons allow students to identify and jump to the next relevant module.

Download MaraMedia digital manuals from the iTunes store.

Watch the MaraMedia App of the Week video:

Don’t miss learning about Digital Publishing Suite at MPA’s Swipe 2.0 – Thursday, March 28 in NYC. Danny Winokur, VP & General Manager, Digital Media, will discuss how and why digital magazines are continuing to evolve into a very real business as digital readership and content engagement climbs. He’ll also share how leading global publishers have driven significant growth in digital subscription and advertising revenue and why magazine apps should become the epicenter of an innovative publisher’s media strategy.

Learn more about SWIPE.

As a follow-up to yesterday’s post about how Adobe Digital Publishing Suite fits into Renault’s brand engagement strategy, we are featuring Renault Captur in our App of the Week Video Series. This gives our readers a chance to see specifically how Renault uses the features in Digital Publishing Suite to “capture” the attention of readers and tell the brand’s story.

Highlights from the video:

• Slideshows outline the design from concept to reality
• Pan and zoom shows the car in gorgeous detail
• Image sequence gives readers control over their view of the car, from 360 rotation to breaking the car into its constituent parts
• Audio can be played throughout the app, and paused by the reader

Check out the Renault Captur App of the Week video.

Renault, the French auto manufacturer, recently launched a gorgeously designed app using Digital Publishing Suite that features its new urban crossover vehicle, Captur. Through video, audio and interactivity in the app, Renault not only engages consumers with its products and brand – but also tells the story of how Captur went from “concept to reality”. The app showcases the attention-to-detail that Renault infuses its products – and allows potential customers to experience these features in a way only the tablet app medium can provide.

For example, one portion of the app allows the user to interactively explore the different lighting features the car offers – illuminating not only the beautiful design of the car, but allowing the user to engage with the product as they are considering purchase. In addition, through video interviews with the designers of the vehicle and a special “making of” video that explores the genesis of the project, customers can become thoroughly acquainted with the brand and product line.

In considering the strategy for the app, Laurence Hertzberg, Director of Digital Marketing at Renault notes, “Today’s applications are expected to be intuitive, fun and informative. We chose to use Adobe Digital Publishing Suite because of its unique technology which allowed us to create an immersive experience that is also very rich in content.”

Renault designer Boris Petrovitch-Njegosh also writes, “Captur is the fruit of long, careful reflection about the design of our vehicles and offers a glimpse of the future. It was consequently vital for us to produce an application of the same calibre in terms of its design, user-friendliness and clarity of content. Adobe Digital Publishing Suite turned out to be the ideal solution that gave us exceptional creative freedom and, as well as a comprehensive, near-industrial approach the development process.”

See a short video about the app (subtitled in English), and also download from the App Store below.

• Download the Renault Captur: From Concept to Reality app on the App Store
• View the App of the Week video highlighting the Renault app

In time for St. Patrick’s Day, the Royal Irish Academy, in conjunction with its partners, announced today a new, interactive app produced with Adobe Digital Publishing Suite that engages users with the history and culture of Ireland.  Exploring the rich heritage of the country through the lens of significant cultural objects, the app, “A History of Ireland in 100 Objects”, not only marks St. Patrick’s Day, but also Ireland’s ascension to the Presidency of the Council of the European Union.

Rich with video, audio and animation, the app showcases Irish history and culture through the country’s treasures.  Designed to promote engagement with the country’s ideals and heritage, the app immerses readers into the country’s history and encourages them to learn more.

“Fintan O’Toole, a journalist from The Irish Times, launched the project in 2011 with a series of newspaper columns highlighting 100 objects from Ireland, the UK and Norway that connect with Ireland’s rich past,” writes Joe Zeff, whose design firm produced the app.  “Those columns became a hardcover book, and that book became the series of apps that we designed and developed for multiple platforms using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.”

Seeking to make the app available to the widest spectrum of users possible, the Royal Irish Academy used the multi-platform functionality of Digital Publishing Suite to deliver the app on iPad, iPhone and on Android tablets, including the Amazon Kindle Fire. The iPhone version is of particular note because it delivers formatted, well-thought out content that fits the on-the-go consumption habits of iPhone users – especially to visitors to Irish museums.

The app is free for download until March 31, 2013 and is a project of the Royal Irish Academy, the National Museum of Ireland and The Irish Times supported by the Presidency of the European Council of the European Union and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Ireland.  Preview the app through a short video below.

• Download the iPad/iPhone app
• Download the Kindle Fire app
• Download the Android tablet app

Calling all B-to-B publishers! Don’t miss this fast-paced, highly informative hour co-hosted by Adobe and ABM, the Association of Business Information Media. During this webinar, the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite team will take you through important trends in digital magazine publishing that you’ll want to know about—trends in device proliferation, the growth of magazine readership and how readers are engaging with digital apps, to name a few.

You’ll also see real-world examples of business publishers who are using DPS to build their digital business, get a tour of the features that are most relevant to business publishers and see how easy it is to create dynamic, highly interactive publications using the design and publishing workflows you already know.

The webinar is free and open to all. Join us on Thursday, March 21 from 2-3pm EST
Learn more and register now: http://www.abmassociation.com/assnfe/ev.asp?ID=270

The Digital Publishing Suite team is honored to receive the Digiday Publishing Award in the “Most Disruptive Publishing Technology” category, just announced yesterday!

The Digiday Publishing Awards honors “overall excellence and breakthrough achievement in digital publishing, branded content and advertising technology.” The DPAs are presented by Digiday, the host of the Digiday Publishing Summit. Hundreds of leading publishers, brand executives, publishers, journalists, experts, and technology visionaries participated in last night’s event, including representatives from The Huffington Post, Hearst Digital Media, Rodale, and Tumblr.

The “Most Disruptive Publishing Technology” category assesses innovation that has changed the publishing business through new methods of content display, delivery, distribution, discovery or monetization tools. (Last year’s winners in this category included: BuzzFeed Inc., Zinio, and Voices Heard Media / EventBox User Engagement Suite.) It is with great pleasure that we accept this award!

The DPAs include multiple categories that award innovations in the growing business of digital publishing, branded content and advertising technology. The judging committee is comprised of leading media and marketing experts, journalists, industry insiders, marketers, publishers and technology visionaries.

• Learn more about the Digiday Publishing Awards
• View the 2013 category winners

By Teresa Demel

Sockupied is a digital-only magazine designed for knitting enthusiasts. It is published by Interweave Press, which owns 15 consumer art and craft magazines such as Crochet and LiveWire (both of which are built with DPS and available on Apple Newsstand). I am not a knitter myself, but many of my friends are. They pore over pictures and patterns of sweaters and socks, looking for their next creation. Sockupied feeds their appetite, with images of inventive knitting patterns, and easy to follow instructions.

“Sockupied is that feeling you get when you wish your ride were a little longer so you could finish your heel turn.”
          -  Sockupied Editor Anne Merrow

As I have mentioned before when I reviewed Cook’s Illustrated and National Geographic Kids, Adobe Digital Publishing Suite is a great way to enhance any tutorial in a publication. Slideshows, nav-to and videos allow publishers to break down instructions and visually demonstrate how to do something. Sockupied is no exception.

In this app of the week video, I demonstrate three levels of engagement with the Sockupied audience. For inspiration, the publication uses slideshows to show multiple views of pairs of socks. It provides basic instruction on how to measure a foot in preparation for knitting, as well as what patterns to follow. For more complicated techniques, such as heel turns, it uses video to flesh out the procedure.

• Watch the Sockupied by Interweave app of the week video to see an example of a motivational and instructional knitting magazine.
• Download Sockupied for your iPad