Feelin’ The Vibe

When you think of a PDF (Portable Document Format), you think of a small file to read a little something. Maybe some replacement product manuals or a contract. Pretty plain Jane. At least in the world of Arobat Reader it is. But in the world of Acrobat Pro, things get a lot more interesting!

Acrobat Pro is great for combining PDF’s, adding annotations, rotating pages, reordering pages, etc. But it also has the capabilities of making the PDF interactive. Like an offline website. And that’s just what a lot of companies were using them for. Car companies, for instance, would make these large beautiful brochures with high quality images, page transitions, audio and even video. The file size that that would generate would be too cumbersome for the average potential buyer. So they would offer these on those little business card CD’s.

In this Frankenstein experiment, I had a total of 23 full-length songs to be played and 10 music videos.

So on this project, I integrated as much as I could all in one file. InDesign has gotten a lot better over the years with its interactive palette. But when I made this, it wasn’t quite as far along. So all the layout and objects had to be in place permanently, and then after I’d export it as a PDF to Acrobat, I’d add everything in there. The links, the page transitions, the audio and even the video.

This was to be a supplemental piece to the monthly paper edition of the popular magazine. Perhaps included in the paper magazine just as when we buy our computer and design magazines, a CD often comes with it with a few more things, like tutorial files and the like.

In this Frankenstein experiment, I had a total of 23 full-length songs to be played and 10 music videos. I also had links to Amazon for CD’s to be purchased. Needless to say, this was a massive PDF! It would have been fun to encounter that each month with the magazine, but the magazine tanked. Maybe because they couldn’t implement a good enough purchasing incentive.