The Dawn of a New Age

When the iPad arrived in all its shiny, awe-inspiring glory three years ago, droves of tech-lovers and every-day consumers alike lined the sidewalks of their local Apple stores just to get their hands on the new tablet. The iPad was, and continues to be, a game-changer, and everyone in line that fateful April morning knew it. Dave Nicastro is proud to say he was one of those people.
Dave is the Creative Director of editorial and custom design at Design Central, a design agency specializing in a wide variety of print and digital creative solutions for editorial, marketing, advertising, events and custom media. A UBM company known for their creative publishing work, Design Central’s impressive portfolio features work with various prominent companies. Until three years ago, the agency dealt mainly in print publishing, conceptualizing and delivering creative printed content such as magazines and marketing collateral. That all changed with the advent of the iPad.

Dave Nicastro

“I’ve been a print designer my entire 30-plus year-career. I like typography and imagery; I never jumped into web design, because I felt that I couldn’t do all the things I wanted to – it felt much more limiting, design-wise,” Dave said. “When I saw the iPad, I thought, ‘This is it. This is where I jump in.’ I was the first person in line to get an iPad. I knew immediately it was going to be a big thing, in publishing particularly. I thought, ‘I’ve got to find a way to get on this and move forward.’”
So began Dave’s search for the right tools to begin his journey into the then-unchartered territory better known as digital publishing. He recalls searching for any tool that would work with the ones already loaded on his desktop and being used in the current Design Central workflow; namely, Adobe® InDesign®. Seek and you will find. And what Dave found was Aquafadas.

Tearing Down the Barriers to Entry with Aquafadas

When Dave initiated Design Central’s transition into digital, he looked to the tools that had already proved to be successful for the firm, but soon realized this strategy wouldn’t work. “Many others provided the tools to go digital, but the cost models were a huge barrier to entry for our clients’ publications to cost-effectively maintain profit. I quickly found out that people weren’t willing to put in the money to move in this direction,” said Dave. That’s when he turned to Aquafadas.
“I found Aquafadas to be the perfect fit for our purposes. We could pay for services on an a la carte basis; we could host it ourselves and pay per issue with no download fees. Not to mention, the Aquafadas tools did everything we needed them to do, and more. That’s really what set us off. We were tied into certain technology but the cost structure was too limiting. Aquafadas solved this issue and offered a single platform with modules to serve an even wider range of possibilities – eBooks, apps, magazines.”

The Aquafadas Digital Publishing System was the answer to Design Central’s call for a solution to publishing on the iPad. Covering all aspects of digital publishing from content design and app creation to distribution and analytics, Aquafadas Digital Publishing tools enable designers like Dave to build custom applications for various platforms, including iOS.

Aquafadas’ Adobe InDesign plug-in provides total control over the design of a publication. AVE AppFactory facilitates the process of publishing apps, with free tools to guide users through every step of the way while creating apps and allowing Dave and his team to check the progress of a project through a simulator. Aquafadas’ Publisher Portal, an online service for distribution and sales management as well as marketing analytics, complements and links AVE AppFactory and InDesign plug-ins, creating one robust suite of publishing tools. Together, these tools from Aquafadas perfectly fit the bill for Design Central, and have been an office essential ever since.
Design Central could now publish interactive content as Apps and eBooks and to the web easily, with no need for programmers and absolutely no coding involved. The process required a minimal learning curve, with the Aquafadas system leveraging the tools Dave was already committed to using in his workflow. And just like that, Dave could make his mark on the next frontier – the iPad.
“The Aquafadas Digital Publishing System allows us to reuse content in a cost-effective way by interpreting the content, bringing it into digital format and providing the necessary tools to tweak it,” Dave tells us. “On the flip side, we can create something totally from scratch.”
So with their shiny new set of tools, Dave and company employed both strategies – optimizing existing work, generating exciting new digital-only content and, in effect, delivering high quality results to clients.

Reinvigorating Content to Make the Old New Again

While Design Central had been working on a variety of non-print projects for years – including events, photo and video, and website design – they saw the opportunity to expand their service offerings with some help from Aquafadas. One of these new services was taking clients’ current print-only content and adapting it to the iPad. Luckily, Aquafadas made this process easy for them. With AVE PDF, Dave and his team could transform clients’ existing print files and enhance them with interactive features like video, slideshows, hyperlinks and more.
The Design Central team hit the ground running with one of their long-time print magazines. Translating the content was as easy as importing it into AVE PDF, which reads the fonts, images, and other assets used, and then re-renders them into the digital layout. The system retains the integrity of existing materials while allowing Dave and his team to manipulate them, making content more engaging for platforms like the iPad.
“That was the first Aquafadas-created product we went live with in the summer of 2011,” Dave recalls. “Aquafadas allowed us to add in the flexibility to make it more interactive and interesting in the digital format. Our client wanted all the extra bells and whistles we were now able to add, like videos and hyperlinks. With each edition, we add more and more interactivity.”
The digital format brings a whole new level of engagement with readers, allowing them to dive much deeper into the magazine’s features and move past simply reading text and viewing images. Transforming the design of a print magazine from the flat surface of coffee table-world to the infinite dimensions of the iPad also allowed Dave to envision the content in a whole new way – something he’d been yearning to do since he first saw the iPad.
“In the past, we would have had to run longer stories on so many pages. Now, with these digital counterparts, we want to keep the app contained to a certain size instead of running a story over eight pages,” says Dave. “With the ability to create scrolling text, we can tell a story in one or two panels. That’s really intriguing to me – to be able to tell the story in just one area. You can tap a button and it changes to video or displays a panel or animation, then tap the screen and it goes back to the story.”

New Content Takes On a Non-Linear Approach for the Ultimate Creative Freedom

With a new sense of creative freedom and the Aquafadas technology now in their digital toolshed, Design Central began to explore all of the possibilities with clients, taking on new projects that expanded even further into the digital universe.
“Aquafadas allows us to create apps totally free form. It gives us tremendous power, enabling us to think in an entirely different way and reimagine what a magazine can be,” Dave comments. “We’re not limited by the structure of a preconceived publication. We’re able to flow content in a very nonlinear format with different layers of information. From a design agency standpoint, this is very powerful.”
With Design Central’s first magazine that was conceptualized as digital-only, Dave and his team had the freedom to go anywhere they wanted with the app, adding in interactivity in the form of embedded videos, scrolling text, slideshows of product teardowns and much more.
“We hold a weekly meeting with our client, and during every meeting, I show them the upcoming issue’s layouts and interactivity via a join.me session. It’s their favorite part of our meetings,” says Dave. “They’re incredibly happy with what we’re able to produce.”
Overall, Design Central’s clients have been over the moon with Dave and his team’s creative abilities. He reports clients are also quite pleased with the amount of information they are able to smartly integrate into the design of each digital edition. Proof that when the right people have the right tools, anything is achievable.

A Future With Endless Design Possibilities

As the Design Central team unlimits the wealth of information their clients can pack into digital publications, they unlimit themselves, opening up the many possibilities of what they’re able to offer and how the agency is able to grow.
“Adapting to and existing in this digital realm has opened up a new revenue stream for us, among many other opportunities,” Dave comments. “If we remained on the sidelines, we would still have digital content on the web and other platforms, but, with the help of Aquafadas, we are now a serious competitor in the app world. It’s going to be a growing part of our business. Print, especially business to business, is declining; I see many more opportunities in custom digital publishing. We’ve really been getting away from print over the last year or two; it’s a change in thinking.”

For Dave, accepting this change wasn’t a begrudging choice – it was a prescient move that took Design Central off the sidelines and into the game as a serious contender, with Aquafadas ready for the assist. “Tablets are being gobbled up. They’re finding their way into businesses and people will be engaging with them more and more over the next few years,” Dave wisely predicts. And he is not about to let Design Central miss out on that action.
While the waters are still muddy and the future of digital publishing remains somewhat unclear, what is clear is that this industry is not slowing down or waiting for the bystanders to catch up. Luckily for Design Central, they’re already ahead of the curve. And as they continue to master the tools and hone their vision as a leader in the digital publishing realm, Design Central’s future will be very bright indeed.

http://www.ubmdesigncentral.com