My co-worker and I had been using the same brochure development tool to create brochures for an office project for months. When her brochures starting receiving all the praise I couldn’t figure out what caused the shift. Then I realized she wasn’t making regular brochures using Word brochure templates at all. She was using Yumpu Publishing, a free brochure creator that can be used to design gorgeous interactive brochures online! When the change happened I couldn’t figure out what was behind it. I didn’t know why her brochures looked better than mine all of a sudden and wondered whether there was anything I could do to keep up. We both used Word brochure templates to put our brochures together yet hers’ looked nothing like my dull low resolution brochures when shared online!
Seeing is believing!
I brushed it aside for a couple of days but the circus of praise ensued. Her sudden creative genius continued to be a mystery to me until one day I walked past her desk and I noticed that she was working from an online app. Curiosity got the best of me. What she was using looked nothing like the regular old application we used to convert our brochures so I called her out for it. She laughed and told me she hadn’t used the software provided by the office in weeks!
With that revelation she let me know that she had turned to Yumpu Publishing, a free online platform that lets you create your own brochures, magazines and pretty much any other type of publication. Her reason? According to her, the platforms free version offered better results with less hassle even when compared to our company’s old faithful – which was definitely not free.
If I hadn’t seen the result for myself I wouldn’t have ever believed she could have achieved anything like that with a free trial. I sat with her that afternoon and she showed me how it worked. If there was a way to save time and effort and get even better brochure-making results then I definitely wanted to know about it. She created a free account for me and I uploaded a PDF onto the server to begin. It was that easy! We used the rest of our creative hour exploring the new software and I continued to be blown away.
I noticed immediately that what I had seen was the tip of a very expansive iceberg. The application veered leaps and bounds from the creation of design and print brochures into the realms of digital art. Yumpu Publishing made it possible to create super interactive, engaging brochures in minutes. That day I watched in a state of amazement as she used the hotspot editor to add video, sounds, links (and even a slideshow!) to her publication. Hotspots could be dragged and dropped to the desired pages and once that was done it was super easy to manipulate positioning and sizing. To say we’d struggled with that with the old application would have been a huge understatement!
Moving away from using Word brochure templates only – Upload video, slides, and sounds.
With the new application, it was possible to upload video, sounds, and slides directly onto the website or through third-party sites like Youtube, Vimeo, Soundcloud, and Flickr. Whereas we had been working with software that limited us to adding just about 10 slideshow images, with the free brochure maker there was no limit to the number of images that could be included in slides.
After our brief tutorial, I left her to finish her own work and I continued exploring the platform. I was impressed most of all by the optimized content delivery technique that allowed content to always optimized – no matter what kind of device was being used. This meant more to me than a lot of the other features because it meant that loading times would be reduced to a minimum and that small images could be seen without any loss of quality on smartphones as compared to larger screens. If we were going the digital brochure route I knew at that moment we needed to do it right and as such, it was important for our delivery to remain at the optimal level on all mediums.
I finished creating my brochure and uploaded it to the website. From there I used the application’s social media optimized sharing to get my work to my audience and was genuinely astounded at how easy it was to do so. That day we both received high praises for working as a team and for being forward-thinking. Our brochures still look amazing and the best part about it all was that we got the company to sign up for a paid plan. You can try it for yourself today at Yumpu Publishing.