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

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The Creative Bloq team is made up of a group of design fans, and has changed and evolved since Creative Bloq began back in 2012. The current website team consists of six full-time members of staff: Editor Kerrie Hughes, Deputy Editor Rosie Hilder, Deals Editor Beren Neale, Senior News Editor Daniel Piper, Digital Arts and Design Editor Ian Dean, and Staff Writer Amelia Bamsey, as well as a roster of freelancers from around the world. The 3D World and ImagineFX magazine teams also pitch in, ensuring that content from 3D World and ImagineFX is represented on Creative Bloq.