In the latest Spectacle blog post, Darren Kilfara talks about an innovative corporate
newsletter he designed for Lloyds Banking Group: a PDF document which effectively functions as a self-contained intranet site.
Spectacle recently completed an unusual internal communications project for the Finance Team at Lloyds Banking Group. The in-house creative team at
Lloyds was overloaded with work and needed help, so our brief was to design and edit the first issue of a new Finance Team "eZine", a newsletter full of stories and information designed to help
the team's employees feel more positive about a wide-ranging programme of engagement and development activities. What we wound up creating, however, was effectively a portable website in
PDF form: a document with all the convenience of an email attachment but with the elegance and interactivity of a fully functioning website.
Page 1 layout of the "PDF as website" designed for the Finance Team at Lloyds
Did you know that PDF files can be designed to contain internal as well as external hyperlinks? Adobe Acrobat Reader isn't designed to function as a web browser, but with some careful signposting and well constructed hyperlinks, you can almost make people forget they're not viewing a website. The above image shows how we did this for Lloyds: the grey sidebar on the right serves as the PDF's table of contents, with the green underlined text written and designed to look like links to anyone even remotely familiar with traditional website design. (Actually, you can click anywhere on the imagery or text in the grey sidebar - not just on the underlined text - and be taken to the relevant page in the PDF.) Scroll down to the next page of the PDF or click on the "The Year That Was" link at the top, and you see this:
Page 2 layout, with smaller sidebar
The grey sidebar is now more compact and links to each of the same sections as before, as well as to the top of page 1. This also serves as its own landing page, with links to each of six different sub-pages - so that, e.g., if you click anywhere on the Line Management Development image, title or text, you get taken to page 9:
Page 9 layout
In a traditional newsletter, whether printed or saved as a PDF, the size of each page is constant, and the content must fit that size. But just as each page
on a website scales to fit its content, each page in this PDF has been tailored on a bespoke basis: page 1 is wider than the other pages, which in turn are taller or shorter than each
other depending upon the amount of content in them. On the other hand, unlike most websites, this PDF can easily be printed and/or saved for offline viewing, giving readers extra
choice and flexibility regarding how they can consume or share it.
This eZine proved to be very popular with the team at Lloyds, and we can envision many ways this "Portable Website" concept might benefit different types of businesses. As an internal communications tool, it can easily cut across different communications infrastructures: large companies can use it to disseminate important messages in a stylish manner without disenfranchising sites using older/legacy intranet systems or remote workers with no intranet connection at all. As a self-contained marketing tool for specific projects, it can complement other online and written communications, serving neatly as a bridge between the two. And because PDFs automatically scale across different devices, you don't need a complicated website to ensure it gets your message across to your target audience exactly as you want it, which makes it an ideal tool for small businesses with specific needs.
We look forward to designing other portable websites in the future and seeing how this concept continues to develop.
Darren Kilfara is the founder and head of Spectacle Communications.
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