One of the biggest advantages of digital publishing is being able to provide a wealth of deep content to our audiences without having to worry about blowing the print budget and cramming content into predefined page sizes. Over a year of producing fortnightly or monthly newsletters, digital info packs and magazines, an organization can easily end up with hundreds of content pieces containing potentially thousands of rich, full-screen, colour photography.

With Hail, all that content can very quickly and easily be curated into a full overview of the year. That’s what made theHail Yearbook such a unique challenge — how do we provide an engaging, visually attractive publication, while maintaining a simple and highly usable interface to all that content? Once again Tags, with their ability to organise content in the Hail backend as well as the publications, were the obvious path.

The tricky part was bringing the content to the forefront in such a way that a reader landing on the Yearbook's cover would gain immediate insight into the depth of material available. Attracted to key areas and based on their individual interests, they could begin their own pathway through the publication.

Plus, as with everything you publish with Hail, it had to work across every device type and size our audiences are using — that's the sort of challenge that gets the Hail team really cooing.

Bigger, brighter, smarter

With Hail you get to concentrate all your efforts on creating great, well-formatted and organized content. With our publications there’s no need to worry about design templates or resizing imagery, just select your articles and publication style, give it a title and Hail does the rest — with no design expertise required. We’re sure you’ll be impressed by your very own beautiful, responsive publications.

Now, with the Hail Yearbook we've taken it one step further to make it our smartest publication style yet:

• The Yearbook analyses all your featured photography, extracting it’s background and highlight colours for branding the cover, tag and article views — automagically creating a bright, colourful design to provide a unique, customized reading experience that’s sure to be shared far and wide.
  
  
• With so much material in one publication we wanted to ensure your most important and best presented content wasn't lost. That’s why we designed the cover blocks with various sizes and shapes; the larger ones reserved for tags with the most content and articles with the highest rating. These visual cues are automatically generated by theYearbook, which is the first Hail publication to make use of the backend rating system. We’re sure you’ll find it to be another simple, but powerful curation tool.
  
  
• We recognize that while most readers love to explore and create their own unique content pathways, others prefer a more structured reading experience and appreciate the ability to read from ‘cover-to-cover’. That’s why we’ve also included the more traditional article and tag indexes, as well as the ability to search across all articles; returning results for specific subjects, people and authors.
  

For an example of the Hail Yearbook, check out Logan Parks' 2014 end of year magazine, then create your own! Digital publishing extends your deadlines, so it's not too late to discover the time saving, collaborative efficiencies of Hail's end-to-end content creation and publishing — sign up or get in touch today.