Adding interactivity

At its most basic, editorial design is words and pictures on pages. It doesn't move or make a sound, and you can't click, drag or move it. You look and read, and don't interact. That's where people think newspapers and magazines lose out to the internet and screen-based media. And to an extent, it's true.

If you're a traditional print designer, HTML, XML or ActionScript may seem like a foreign language. The aesthetic side of screen design is similar to print but, all of a sudden, you need to be a computer programmer to make things 'work'.

Plenty of magazines these days have a website to support or complement them, but why can't the magazine itself also be the website? By that we don't just mean a flat representation of print, but an all-singing, all-dancing interactive version.

Thanks to InDesign, you don't have to learn another application to produce a respectable multimedia-rich PDF file. In part two of this three-part tutorial, you'll learn how to can take the simple print-based publication created last issue and turn it into a fully functioning interactive PDF to view on screen, with clickable hyperlinks, navigation buttons and even embedded movies.

Click here to download the support files ( 11MB)

Click here to download the tutorial for free