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• • August 8, 2020 at 7:43 am #14328465
    Jane Small

    Member

    Hello!
    I am a former designer from way back – I switched careers years ago, but now find myself working with my company’s creative dept on a project that has stalled out. I would like to create a Product Selector Tool that educates customers about our products (it is very text heavy) but also guides them to a list of suggested products for what they are doing. The creative team insists they will build this as an interactive PDF (I cannot change this, I tried, trust me…). They have given me a draft of my Selector Tool, and I am very unhappy with it. The colors are random and don’t help orient the user, there are underlined hyperlinks in the navigation menu (*underlined hyperlinks in a menu!!!*) It looks like it was created in 1997 – it’s pretty terrible. When I suggest changes, they protest.
    My problem is that when I was a designer, I used Photoshop and some Illustrator, but never InDesign. So I understand the virtually unlimited potential to design how it would look using those programs, but I am not familiar with the design or functional limitations of InDesign, and I am really struggling with how to get the team to do better. I think I am asking for reasonable things, but they protest everything I ask for (even color changes!!!) and act like it’s impossible. Is InDesign really as restrictive as they act like it is?
    I need to see examples of well done interactive PDFs, so that I can know what actually can and can’t be done, and so that they can see what can be accomplished if they go outside of their comfort zone. I have tried to find some on my own, but with no luck. Can anyone help please?
    P.S. – I would even be willing to pay someone a small fee to look at what they’ve given me and discuss it for maybe 15 minutes. I am at my wits end. Any help would be greatly appreicated.
    Thank you so much!!

  • August 10, 2020 at 7:29 am #14331363
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    No, InDesign is not restrictive when it comes to design; that’s why it’s the leading layout tool in the world!
    PDF does have significant limitations on what it can do, but what you’re describing doesn’t seem to match those limitations.
    If hyperlinks are underlined, they probably need to edit whatever character style is applied to that text (probably “Hyperlink”). Changing other colors shouldn’t be an issue.
    When you say “menu,” you’re not talking about animated menus that drop down, are you? PDF normally can’t do those.
    You can post photos on dropbox or Imgur or elsewhere and post links here if you want.

  • September 10, 2020 at 12:52 pm #14331386
    Jane Small

    Member

    Thanks David. I appreciate your help.
    So since this post, I watched a bunch of videos by Terry White (excellent!!) and figured out that the creative team should be able to not only do the simple things I’m asking for, but possibly even tackle the bigger issue, which is enable a complex navigation scheme. Not drop down menus, but more like multi-levels, with primary, secondary, and tertiary menus to drill down through the text. It seemed to me that this navigation approach should be possible if they save the final product as an ePub document. Basically this would allow for object states, which I think would work really well and negate the need to build an 80 page PDF, which would of course be ridiculous.
    I was really hopeful when I presented the ePub idea to them and the possibilities that object states made possible. They had not heard of this, complained it was outside of their skill set and were very skeptical. And now, as per usual, they are protesting and gave me the following response, which I don’t really know how to answer:
    Everything we read about the ePub platform indicates one clear point: it’s a “flow-able” (and scalable) text platform, not graphical-focused. This is called XHTML.
    • The technology is for delivering accessible text to a broad canvas of (consumer) reading devices ie iBooks, Kindle, and as well as websites ie Yahoo, AP, Bloomberg.
    • We could not find any examples of ePub demonstrating highly-graphical navigation, etc. in the path we are discussing.
    • Anecdotally, I have never been offered ePub as a choice for B2B content.
    So my questions are:
    1. Am I wrong about ePub? And are they right?? Is it not the solution I thought it was for my idea? (You can see what I created in Photoshop to help them understand what I want in the Dropbox link below).
    2. Are there examples anyone can point me to of ePub for highly graphic navigation and/or for B2B content?
    https://www.dropbox.com/s/61yiwmg4iefr7bv/Probe%20Selector%20Tool%20layout%20.pptx?dl=0
    Slide 2 is what they proposed. All slides after are what I proposed based on trend research (slide 1, also mine).
    Ideally this would be a downloadable file that someone could use to sort through our products and figure out what will work best for them.
    Thank you!!!!!

  • September 10, 2020 at 2:29 pm #126988
    David Blatner

    Keymaster

    There are 2 flavors of EPUB: flowable and fixed.
    Flowable epub is like a book you’d read on Kindle, where it flows from page to page.
    Fixed Layout EPUB (sometimes called FXL) is like a PDF, but you can include animation, buttons, etc.
    FXL is awesome, and many people use it for B2B… except there is one problem: you need to be sure the person reading it has a reader for it. All Apple Mac and iOS devices support FXL. But Windows and Android devices require the user to download a reader app (there a number of them).

  • September 10, 2020 at 3:21 pm #126989
    Jane Small

    Member

    OH that is very helpful! Thank you for explaining! :)

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