Client study - Student Support Centre

The Student Support Centre provide support material for children to help them achieve more at school.

Creatopia were asked to convert the client's existing bi-monthly magazine to a web format to maximise exposure of the publication and to allow children to view back issues.

Magazine conversion
The first step in the conversion process of the magazines was to determine how should they be seen on-screen. Should they be just converted to web pages or something more interactive?
It was decided that a nice format would be a flash magazine with turning pages. This, of course, created its own issues. At this time web magazines were starting to take off but were limited to image intensive, low text publications such as car brochures. The Student Support magazine, Passmasters, had a lot of images and a lot of text. To complicate matters further,as it was an existing publication, the layout was already done so things could not be moved around.
Let us not forget, of course, the conversion of the original files into something useable in Flash.
Many hours were spend developing a system to facilitate a straight-forward conversion from original into Flash. If this were a one-off it would prove an expensive conversion but an agreement was made with the client to convert a minimum number of magazines with a discount on any subsequent conversions. In this way the R&D costs could be spread out.
The magazine was created in Quark Xpress so this was the first port of call. Once opened, the magazine was gone through, page by page moving all images onto a single layer and all text on to another. The image layers were exported as JPEG images, the text layers would need a little more work. They were exported as EPSs and then imported, again page by page, into Illustrator. From there they would be exoprted as SWF Flash files.
The Flash document itself was designed to generate the page turning from movie clips of each page in the library. To create the page the JPEG of the magazine page would be imported to one layer of a movie clip, the text SWFs would then be imported into a second layer.
This worked well although a fairly decent machine was needed to turn the page as there was a lot of processing going on. To combat this code was written into the Flash file which, as the page was clicked in preparation to turn, would swap the text an image to low resolution versions. As the page finished turning they were swapped back into the high resolution originals again. This worked well on all but the very lowest end machines. As a back-up a simplified version was also created; a flip-page version with buttons to flip from page to page.