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2nd November 2021

Collateral damage: Why digital publishing is flourishing

The idea of digital publishing has been around for decades, in fact it started in 1971 when Project Gutenberg was launched with the digitisation of the US Declaration of Independence. 

Since then, it has grown substantially and evolved into a force that has taken on and surpassed conventional publishing. There are a few reasons for this:

  • Everything that’s printed in one of your brochures, is probably available on your company website and often, with ultra-fast product cycles, the chances are the printed version will soon be out of date.
  • We spend more and more time researching and experiencing brands online, so it’s important that our digital shop fronts look as attractive as their bricks and mortar cousins but also offer the same immersive experience.
  • The environmental benefits that come with digital collateral are worth it alone (saves trees and natural resources, reduces energy costs and your carbon footprint and prevents paper pollution).

There is of course still a time and a place for printed marketing material; it has value and the platforms we use allow users to print individual pages or the entire thing. Depending on your audience, an integrated approach of printed and digital collateral may be the best option and is often what we recommend to our clients – albeit the lines are blurring between offline and online with the popular use of QR codes and Augmented Reality.

Thanks to technology, catalogues, brochures and magazines are becoming much more of an immersive experience for an ever-increasing tech-savvy audience. With the use of video, talking heads, 360-degree virtual tours, explainer animations, plus extensive back-end analytics so you can see what content is being engaged with helping to inform refinements and future marketing activity, it’s easy to see why. And as a technology agnostic agency, we’ll only use the most appropriate platform, whether that’s Joomag, Foleon or issuu or any of the other services on the market at the moment. This short video for Escape Studios guides you through the benefits of digital publishing.

These examples show how slick and simple they can be.

Bringing your brand to life

Digital publishing is very much a collaborative approach, and we follow a rigorous process to ensure what we deliver is exactly right for your brand:

  1. Flat plans and content curation: We’ll develop a flat plan detailing the flow of the entire brochure. We’ll suggest where we should position CTA’s as well as any initial ideas for how to best use the functionality of the platform.
  2. Creative development: Our creative team will explore 2-3 routes options including front cover/inside spread examples as well as other key spreads to show how the idea/style tracks through.
  3. Design development: During this phase we’ll bring the chosen idea to life using beautiful design and custom fonts as flats with annotated narrative explaining the spread of interactivity from audio visual to page turning functionality.
  4. Offline conversion: We’ll design an offline version using the same design and pagination, utilising paper engineering techniques to bring it to life. We’ll use QR codes and short trackable URLs where relevant.

Costs will depend on the size and scope of your project, however as a guide, a 20-page brochure including platform subscription would be around c.£15K.

To find out how Hunterlodge can create an interactive catalogue, brochure or magazine for your brand, contact nick.friend@hunterlodge.co.uk

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