Friday, September 11, 2009

A Simple, Slick-looking Document Viewer by Issuu

It's Fringe Festival time in Vancouver and so I took myself to the festival website to check out this year's program guide.

http://www.vancouverfringe.com/2009-program-guide/

They use an interesting viewer to display their program guide which I thought was worth mentioning.
A website called Issuu lets you upload any document you want to an online Flash player which has different page display options, is intuitive and is free to use unless you want the ad-free full version.
The nice thing is that the ads are relevant to the document, employing some Google AdWords-type of platform. The Fringe site had thumbnails of other arty documents in several languages and when you rolled over one a pop-up balloon would have the name and description of the document. Some documents were in foreign languages, which gave me the impression that the Vancouver Fringe was part of a much larger and diverse community.
My one complaint was that I had no quick Table of Contents to link me to what I was looking for, i.e. a map. Instead I had to eyeball the table of contents then go through 2 sets of pages before i could get to the page I wanted.
But it still looked good and I saved a tree.
Here is the Issuu website: http://issuu.com/business

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