What Digital Magazine Platform is Right for Your Team?

In the early days of online publishing, digital magazines took the form of PDFs, flipbooks, or basic websites. Reading online editorial content followed the same straightforward paths one would take while skimming through the morning newspaper.

Today, we don’t expect the websites we visit to mirror the real world. Digital magazines are a medium all their own, revealing content through dynamic user experiences that inspire curiosity and guide us to a deeper level of understanding.

Choosing the right digital magazine software depends on whether you want something simple or require the flexibility to create more artistic and immersive user experiences. We’re going to cover a wide range of digital magazine tools like Vev, helping you find the best online publishing platform for what you want to create.

Key features to look for in a digital magazine platform

ABOVE AIGA’s Eye on Design is a great example of a publication that combines a smart visual aesthetic with meaningful articles.

Design flexibility

Whether you’re beginning with a template, or building something from scratch, it’s nice to have creative control. Look for digital magazine platform apps that let you adjust the layout, color schemes, typography, as well as set the other styles that will contribute to its visual identity. Drag-and-drop based editors like Vev offer an easy starting point, letting you place text, visuals, and other elements into any arrangement you’d like.

Interactive magazine design

Website visitors are accustomed to clicking, hovering, and scrolling to control what they see. The best digital magazine software makes it easy to add user-triggered animations as well as interactive features like image carousels, hot spots, and micro-interactions. Interactive magazine design is important because it keeps people engaged with content and offers multiple paths in how they experience it.

Ease of use

Designing a digital magazine means working with text, images, animations, interactions as well as UI elements.

No-code apps like Vev that have drag-and-drop components, animation presets, and visual canvases make designing an online magazine faster. In addition to streamlining the design process, those from non-technical backgrounds, like writers and marketers can make contributions as well as edits.

Integration capabilities

While so much of interactive magazine design is focused on crafting interesting and visually driven narratives, it’s always a plus to have the capabilities to integrate with other apps.

Content management systems

Headless content management systems like Contentful have templates that can be utilized with no-code apps like Vev.

Using an online publishing platform for the front-end and a CMS on the backend, offers much in terms of artistic freedom, as well as taking care of the more tedious aspects of publishing and managing content. A headless CMS keeps assets like text and images in the form of data, which can be visualized on a website’s front end. This ‘decoupling’ of the front and back-end, where content is managed independently from how it’s displayed, gives more precise control over how it appears.

Google Analytics

Knowing what articles get the most views, the time visitors spend on a page, and how far down they scroll, shows what content resonates with your audience. Numbers like bounce rates that indicate how many people bail on a page without interacting further, or exit rates showing the specific pages people commonly leave from are important in showing what needs improvement.

Hot Jar

While Google Analytics distills down how a website is performing into pure numbers, its refreshing to be able to see this data put into a more visual form. Hot Jar’s heat and scroll maps, show where people are clicking, and where their attention drops off.

Performance and SEO optimization

When picking the best digital design platform for what you want to do creatively, it’s also good to consider its SEO readiness. All of the content and design that you put so much thought and hard work into needs to be friendly for the web crawlers scanning through it.

Fast loading times

Slow load times lead to higher bounce rates. A digital magazine platform needs to make sure that images get the proper compression, there aren’t too many scripts running in the background, and that animations and interactions don’t take up too many system resources.

Responsive design

Google’s web crawlers generally rank websites that are mobile-friendly over those that aren’t. Digital magazine software like Vev makes it easy to optimize a website for desktop, tablet, and mobile.

Best Digital Magazine Platforms

Adobe InDesign + Adobe Publish Online

While InDesign continues to be a helpful tool for creating printed materials like brochures or sales fliers, it also comes in handy for laying out and publishing digital magazines.

If you already know Photoshop, InDesign offers a familiar user interface with a toolbar on the left and a properties panel on the right. Along with the Adobe’s common tools for working with shapes, text, and layers, InDesign has features like Master Page for creating multiple pages from a single template, as well as the capabilities to add interactions like buttons, animated page transitions, and embed media like video and audio.

Another benefit to using InDesign is the built-in tool Adobe Publish. Adobe Publish lets you export your layout generally retaining most of its features. With its roots in print, InDesign is a great tool for traditional layouts but falls short in as far as the interactivity we expect in modern web design.

Issuu

Issuu is a stripped down digital magazine platform whose main functionality is converting files into formats like flipbooks, articles, or social media posts. Whether you’re starting with something like a PDF, Google Slide, or some other popular format, all Issuu requires is to upload it, and then it does the rest. Issuu is a nice tool if all you require is the bare minimum in a digital magazine platform, but for those who require more customization options you’ll have to look somewhere else.

Flipsnack

Flipsnack is a straightforward online publishing platform that works by uploading a PDF, or putting together a layout in its visual editor. 

Flipsnack is a good fit all you want to create is a basic flipbook, but for more complicated functionality like scroll-triggered effects, animated page transitions, or more customized interactive magazine design features, you’ll want to seek out a more advanced digital magazine platform.

Vev

For those who want artistic possibilities and the ease of no-code, Vev is a flexible and powerful digital magazine platform.

As an all-rounder, Vev can be used for adding interactive components to your existing content, or build entire photo essays and scrollytelling articles from scratch.

Keep reading for an in depth guide to using Vev for web editorial design, production and publishing.

A deeper look: Why Vev is the best digital magazine platform choice

Unmatched creative freedom

While PDFs and flipbooks serve useful purposes, especially for traditional documents like booklets or brochures, they can feel too static. Vev offers the interactive and animated possibilities of modern web design through the powers of no-code.

Whether you want to grab a template, or build something that’s completely your creation, Vev offers precise control over how a website will look and behave. 

Seamless integrations

Vev also pairs well with other tools. From tracking visitors’ behavior with Google Analytics or Hot Jar, to CMS integrations with apps like Contentful or WordPress, Vev syncs up with a variety of software apps that will help you out in creating content and seeing how it performs.

Advanced Interactivity

Features like micro-interactions, animations, and dynamic elements bring better engagement to digital magazines.

A few of the captivating and eye-catching effects you can add with Vev include:

• Scroll-triggered animations
• Hover effects
• Zoom ins/outs
• Scrollytelling text set over videos or images
• Sticky position elements
• Multi-part animations

Scalable and efficient

When the time comes to ramp up content creation, Vev makes scaling up a faster process. With features like reusable components, global styles, and a shared design environment, designers, developers, and people in other roles can collaborate on creating fresh content that has a consistent look and feel.

Vev isn’t just for digital magazines 

While there’s so much you can use Vev for in doing interactive magazine design, it’s a versatile tool that can be used to create a variety of web content that goes beyond static user experiences.

You can also us Vev to design:

• Microsites
• Landing pages
• Year-in-reviews
• Portfolio websites
• Product pages

Make Vev Your Online Publishing Platform

While there are quite a few choices of digital magazine software out there, not all of them work for interactive magazine design. The best platform for digital magazines is one that doesn’t box you in with limitations. Vev stands out with its wide range of creative possibilities, interactivity, and easy scalability. It brings together everything you need to design interactive magazines that will be interesting to your audience, inspire them to keep reading, and having them return to see what’s new.