By Andrew Keen, Director at White Label
Your next publication won’t just be a page-turner; it will be a fully interactive e-publication with hypertext, embedded video and animated graphics.
The digital era is upon us, and at White Label, Creative Director Andrew Keen explains how his studio has been transforming previously printed publications into fully interactive PDFs which don’t just immerse the reader in a digital landscape – but are cheaper, more sustainable, more accessible and easier to update.
A digital document is a PDF on steroids. It allows people to hyperlink within the document and find their way out of the document to web links, or quickly and easily navigate their way through the document.
Additionally, by including dynamic elements like animation, embedded videos and image galleries, there’s a lot more scope to engage the reader. You can use digital documents as a prospectus, a coffee table-style brochure through a digital media device like an iPad or a tablet, or a highly intuitive event programme.
From a sustainability standpoint, I think it’s definitely the future – I am very passionate about sustainability. So, where possible, I talk anybody and everybody out of printing nowadays because digital documents are a robust solution that offers way more than the printed media. Yes, the printed media is tactile and can be touched, and it’s nice to look at, but from a business sense and added value point of view, digital documents win. Among the benefits are that you have more leeway with regard to deadlines, and any updates can be incorporated instantly without the need to reprint, which works well when you have last-minute programme changes or post-event content.
From an accessibility point of view, they also have more advantages over printed media. You can tag the pictures (written picture descriptions that can be picked up by an e-reader) within digital documents, and we make sure that there is a sitemap that’s used to help e-readers navigate creating a fuller experience for the visually impaired.
The transformation started for us when we began getting contracts to do Post-16 prospectuses for local authorities. They were printing 100-page documents in tens of thousands and circulating them. The content was generally out of date by the time it was printed, so it made no sense. My aim was to try and turn these 100-page documents into an engaging digital format, allowing students to engage more with a more interactive, dynamic solution, allowing them to navigate quickly and find the course they wanted at a college that suited their requirements effectively.
This was in 2021, when not many people were doing them, but we were learning fast – changing the way we communicated via documents not just due to the challenges of pandemic lockdowns, but because keeping ahead of the trend meant we were producing documents which really engaged, informed and delighted their audiences.
In 2022 we started working with the Urban Land Institute (ULI), a global network of cross-disciplinary real estate and land use experts, and PwC, to transform their annual Emerging Trends reports for Europe; US and Canada; Asia and Pacific into a digital interactive publication.
The response blew us away. The use of the trending digital document format led to an increase of 405.6% in page views, while the total number of unique page views also increased by 1516.9% and they also reported a 172.1% increase in downloads from the previous year.
Check out the case study.
Some agencies are going back to using the web as a microsite. In this realm, the content creation platform, Folean, enables people to do the same thing we are doing with digital documents as web microsites. They work with a company called Flourish, which does interactive statistical elements – like charts you can embed within documents which allow lifetime filtering.
We are continuing to produce both interactive pdfs and work on microsites to fulfil our mission of making our communications both more engaging, and more sustainable. I would say in the next three to five years, both digital documents and microsites will have a place and I would expect to see printed media vastly reduced even further than it is now.
You can view some more of our latest interactive digital documents here:
