Indispensable Tools to Use for Your Digital Publication

Published in

marketing-and-branding

4 min readDec 2, 2022

Make your Digital Publication stand out

The internet is littered with “handy” tools to help you — this blog presents a logical summary of our top seven tools that you can use as soon as you start writing texts right through to testing your publication at the end.

2. Web Font Tools — Google fonts, Fontsquirrel and Fontpair

“Boost the recognition of your magazine by linking it seamlessly to your own corporate style”. We give this advice to anyone who starts working on digital publications. It is possible thanks to a combination of Google Fonts and Fontsquirrel. Google Fonts is an ideal database where you can find an amazing number of different fonts. You can then use Fontsquirrel to convert them to a suitable file format in order to load it into our editor.

Perhaps you have chosen the font for the main body of your text, but would like to inject some variety by using a different font for your headers. If so, we definitely recommend Fontpair. You use it to enter a Google font to use for the body text and will then be offered several Google font pairs that work well together.

3. Stock Image Sites (some free of charge)

With print, space was at a premium, but with an online publication, you have all the room in the world. This means that space is no longer a limiting factor, so make use of it! Make sure that your publication is visually perfect: a picture says more than a thousand words. There are numerous image banks, some of which are free, where you can find some really great photographs for your online publication.

Here are a couple of great paid and free stock photo websites:

4. Image editing software

When you’ve chosen the right pictures, you need to make sure that they look their best on all devices. For example, you can crop a picture or adjust your own photographs to slightly improve the lighting. You don’t always need an expensive program like Photoshop for this. For many basic photo-editing jobs, an online tool such as Canva does the job perfectly. Cropping, retouching or resizing: everything is possible, and with a bit of practice or a tutorial, you can become a real pro.

5. Video platforms + Stock sites

Inject some dynamism into your publication! This brings some life into things and increases engagement. It really makes a difference! By using video, full-screen or embedded, your publication becomes much livelier and the reader is more likely to read on. Consider using a cover that features a video on it. A long interview is another great opportunity to use video. Of course, you can type it out, but why not make a great video out of it?

Speaking of videos: it is easy to upload your own videos onto YouTube, Vimeo, or Wistia.

Vimeo and Pexels also offer a number of stock videos meaning that you no longer have to have your own video materials to make your publication even cooler.

6. GIFs… you know, those kitten pictures on continual repeat

A GIF is basically a series of screenshots from a video or several images placed alongside each other. A “living” picture of this kind brings more movement into your publication than a static image. Using Giphy or Imgflip you can make your own GIF with little or no knowledge of Photoshop.

GIFs are now no longer used only as memes (often a joke that can easily be shared in the form of an image or GIF) but also increasingly to support your message. They can be used, for example, to explain complex systems, provide visual support or demonstrate something great. For example, check out these five appliactions for GIFs. Food for thought, right ;).

7. Resizer or a browser for responsive design

In today’s world, your publication will be viewed on all kinds of different devices, each with their own aspect ratio. To make sure that your publication looks good on all of these devices, you need to test its responsiveness.

Go to the Chrome inspection mode: cmd/ctrl + alt + i or right mouse click and ‘inspect’. It’s easy to adjust the format (in pixels) manually or choose one of the pre-set image formats. After this check, you can publish your content and be assured that it looks perfect on your smartphone, tablet, and desktop.

Author bio

Ritesh is a digital marketing manager with years of experience in driving growth. He’s currently the director of inbound marketing at Foleon. You can find more about him on his LinkedIn profile.

STORYLAB.AI GENERATORS

Originally published at https://storylab.ai on December 2, 2022.