3. Graphic design & layout

Next up is the design of your publication. People are very visually oriented and often make a snap judgement based on look ’n feel. So the way your publication looks is very important for its effectiveness.  In this phase all the distinct pages from your online publication will be designed. Some considerations:

• Before starting, make sure that the designers are familiar with the design guidelines, this will ensure the actual publication can match the design.
• It is not necessary to design all pages, neither is it necessary to include all content during this phase. What is important is to have a design for all types of pages.
• There is no problem at all with keeping the existing tools you already use in your workflow, such as InDesign, Photoshop, Pixelmator or Sketch.
• If you’re coming from a print publication then it can be quite a challenge to transition to an online design. We are very happy to assist you on translating from what works well in print to what works well in an online publication. A workshop on your or our location can get some progress made fast.
• The built-in areas can also enrich your design with interactive features like image galleries, videos, iframes and animations . Also take care to incorporate  social media sharing buttons and other links. 
• Do you want to have a customized navigation bar or background? That is possible, just let us know. The navigation bar is 45 pixels in height with icons of preferably a max height of 24 pixels. The icons can have a disabled, active, hover and default state. 
• With photography and other artwork be sure to get high resolution images. To get good retina support you need about 4 megapixel at the least. Don’t worry about unnecessary bandwidth usage — H5mag will automatically scale down to the optimal resolution for each device.

Deliverable: design of master pages

Next step: Developing master pages & styling