Liquidblog

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Europe's best media startups in Helsinki

LiquidBlox was one of the chosen few to exhibit at Media Honeypot on January 9th. Arctic Startup organized the event to get best media startups in Europe and large media companies under one roof for a day's networking session.

The idea behind Media Honeypot is great. Putting innovators and innovation seekers in one space. There was a pitching competition, presentations and a deal room. Not often startups get to talk to several big media executives during a workday. Four hundred professionals attended the the event.

Our favourite startups were Choicely and Appiness.

Choicely is a new digital voting platform that makes voting easy and fun. Choicely seems like a platform to use for holding our own online contests. Pitching competition winner Appiness is introducing the next generation of video commerce. Time-stamped products and brands in video are made shoppable via any smart device.

Overall the day was a success. It further confirmed the LiquidBlox’s role in the media ecosystem. Some media corporations see us as a potential partner. For some we are way too disruptive in offering solutions, similar they have spent a fortune on, out of the box.

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The Utopia of DIY internet

In the new world of DIY internet, anyone can become a media outlet. Graphic designers are the new web developers. Teachers make online teaching materials on a daily basis.

Is DIY internet becoming reality?

From 2005 to 2008, MySpace was the largest social networking site. From the DIY standpoint, it was heaven. Page content could be personalized. All kinds of themes could be used from glittery neon colors to intentionally butt ugly. With a little bit of knowledge of how to work with stylesheets, a person could really create a profile that expressed themself.

Classic MySpace was acquired by Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake in 2011. Since then, business has downscaled and focus is now on the music industry.

There is light at the end of the tunnel for MySpace lovers out there. Brie Hiramine from Mashable writes that the Tumblr blogging tool is showing signs of becoming the new MySpace. But do we really need a new MySpace?

Couldn’t DIY internet be practical and exciting?

Many modern website builders have taken coding out of the loop and made it possible for regular people to create functional web content. One of these is LiquidBlox who’s main focus is in online magazines and catalogues.

LiquidBlox CEO, Jani Hiltunen says the self-service-product has a life of its own. It pushes the boundaries of DIY internet. LiquidBlox staff wonder why many users in Colombia signed in at the same time and all of them published similar publications about Greek history. Later they learned that a school class had started to use their FREE version for school work.

LiquidBlox has been used to create everything from kids’ birthday party invitations to photographers’ portfolios. Four fashion boutique keepers started publishing a fashion magazine that looks so professional that even professional designers think it is.

One of the most explosive expressions of creativity is Smart Happy Magazine. Lisa Lillywhite, a writer and an artist says the magazine is a project to bring together her love of nature and geometry and to share it with others.

This is what Lisa has to say about LiquidBlox: “I’m pretty much self taught when it comes to onscreen graphics. I learn a few tools and then quickly get them to do what I want. So I fell in love with LiquidBlox’s layout tools.  It took just a bit of practise to work it out and then I was away; dividing the blocks up and adding text or images in. Once you understand the concept of the layers of blocks you can make it look however you want.”

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Are digital publications only for big media?

As circulations diminish, printing and distribution costs of magazines, and any publications for that matter, constantly keep rising. Many large publishers are forcing consumers to take on print subscriptions on top of an online subscription to keep the printing machines rolling. Editorial deadlines get shorter, yet at the same time, it takes longer for the printed edition to arrive at your doorstep. And all the time, the pressure for raising the prices grows. All of this has a great effect on the content of magazines and publications. Digital formats are pushing the traditional media and publishing formats constantly.

Why is the transition to digital still lagging behind? Big media houses have had the resources and plenty of time to develop smart solutions for digital publications, where the content from print is brought into a completely new reading format. At the same time, many smaller publishers and organizations are still struggling with unfriendly PDF e-papers.

As an example, Wired has managed to grow it’s tablet footprint to more than 240 000 paying readers and the audience is growing all the time. Keep in mind that we are not talking about a simple e-paper here, but about a tablet optimized digital publication.

The transition toward digital publications is getting faster as we speak and it is not only the privilege of large media houses anymore. There are several ways for smaller publishers, ranging from local newspapers to the community college down the road, to transform their content into something digital that is easy to read and share. Digital is becoming the primary way of publishing, not just a side product of print content.

Publishers already have several good tools for creating digital content without forgetting the all important magazine-like reading experience. With LiquidBlox, you can use readymade publication and magazine templates that can be customized to fit the purpose or just simply start your publication from a blank page. The easy user interface makes it possible for virtually anyone to create a publication that looks professional and is well made.

For example, the magazine of the Finnish family businesses union recently decided to put more focus into their digital magazine. So far, the experiences have been nothing but positive, says their communications manager, Kirsi Hölttä.

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The Magic of lists

Long before the rise of today’s information technology, humans have had a tendency to use all kinds of gadgets to help us remember stuff. And perhaps the most essential of these is the good old list. You encounter lists everywhere online and offline, even more than you might notice.

For example, the shopping list is an essential tool making the trip to the supermarket possible. You most certainly will not remember to buy something you planned without your carefully made list that you just forgot on the kitchen table.

Another clear indication of the importance of lists to mankind is the amount of different apps and software that are basically just list-making tools. Evernote, Basecamp and Trello are just some examples.

And because lists are such a natural and essential thing to us, no wonder they are everywhere in web publications. If you think about websites, they are full of lists:

product lists in catalogues

image galleries

news column lists

contact info lists

list of links in navigation

list of videos

lists of team members

Naturally LiquidBlox software also has different kinds of pre-made list templates available. Image above shows a product list and an online magazine navigational list.  You can edit the number of items and reorder them to your liking. Then just replace the placeholder text and images with your content.

In addition to using our ready-to-use list templates that can be chosen from the menu on the top in the block template view, you can also create one from scratch. When you have a block highlighted, choose the add content option and click add list element. Then select the type of list you want from the templates and define the number of columns to use.

Hopefully this post was able to demonstrate how to make lists in LiquidBlox. Hit us with an email, If we are missing some vital list type as a template.

Happy list-making!

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How to use templates in our online magazine software

Block templates make creating publications a breeze. We have designs for every use, from headline templates to picture collages. Some of them are small and simple, some of them form more complex layout structures. They are created with the aim to cater all kinds of creative needs, from creating online magazines to displaying your art in a handy portfolio.

And by no means is the usage of templates being forced on you, the user. They’re there to help you out when needed, but you can always start creating your online catalogue or magazine layouts from scratch with LiquidBlox. As the picture below demonstrates, the templates are accessed from the “create from template” button when adding content to a page.

The whole idea of templates is to make creating all kinds of publications as easy as possible. Choose from different pre-designed block layouts, to construct the desired pages for an online magazine, catalogue, portfolio, or any other publication. The block templates come in many different shapes and sizes, so you can have many different blocks on the same page. For example, one template could be for the headline, one for the picture collage and one for the text, all on the same page.

Another option is the utilize templates only partially. If creating nice-looking text blocks isn’t really your thing, then use a template for that and create the rest yourself. Elements created with block templates can be edited as any other element. Outcome of your design might be quite different from the the template you started with.

Replacing text

So how about altering and customising those blocks? When you want to add text, you have the obvious two choices: type it in or copy and paste it from another document. Just remember to be careful with text formatting when pasting text. Sometimes formatting is not web competitive and does not work online.  Then it might be wise to use the ”paste only text” –option to just paste the plain text.

TIP: when talking about the text elements of your publication is that the styles of the paragraphs and headings of your text are not carried over from one LiquidBlox publication to another, so the block templates will look like the examples when making a fresh new publication before adding block templates.

Replacing images

With blocks with pictures in them, you have two options. You can either upload a new picture from your files or choose from the ones you have uploaded before. There are a two basic options that are important when fitting your picture content into your publication. The ”crop” mode cuts the image to fill out the desired block. The ”fit” mode adjusts the image size so that is fits completely into the given space.

Editing layout

And the block layouts themselves can be edited. Changing their height and width is incredibly easy, just activate the block and drag the handle to make the block the desired size. All the lines that separate blocks can also be edited in the same way.

We’re adjusting our editor all the time, so don’t hesitate to leave a comment, positive or negative, about the usability, design, or anything at all. Do it through our chat in the page editor or send us email at: https://liquidblox.com/contact

Happy designing!

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Is your online magazine content SEO friendly?

There’s a saying on the web: “The best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google search results.” Apparently 95% of people don’t look beyond the first page when searching for something. Making your content search engine optimized is more important than ever. Can you afford to keep vital information in content that cannot be accessed by Google or other search engines? Probably not. Missing sales is not an option.

And still, many struggle to get their publications search engine optimized. For example, in PDF files the text is often vectorized and thus search engines cannot read and index it. This is often done in order to preserve the fonts used without embedding them in the file. Another common mistake is that PDF files are converted into pictures, and while Google’s abilities might seem godlike, it cannot “read” pictures. At least not yet. Or the pages of the publication are not rendered in a way that search engine algorithms can crawl through it grabbing the text and other metadata.

In LiquidBlox all of the problems listed above have been taken care of. Don’t believe it? Find out yourself by typing “LiquidBlox Publication is a set pages next to each other” into Google. The first result is a direct link leading to page 2 of our how-to guide.

Let’s think about this for a moment. For example, when making a catalogue, all the product information and other text descriptions can be found and indexed by Google. And the magic making all of this possible is HTML5. Each page is also it’s own entity in the sense that you can link to a specific page.

Read more about how we have done SEO at LiquidBlox at LiquidBlox.com

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How to create a stunning portfolio in 5 steps

Life is not easy for artists and designers. For example, creating and updating your personal portfolio can be a tedious task and can take time from more important work. For freelancers it is especially important to create an impressive portfolio that displays your pieces of work in a nice and easy way.

The point of this blog post is to introduce a 5-step model, a kind of a workflow for portfolio creation and updating.

Step 1:

Plan your portfolio. Make a broad outline of the structure of your portfolio with Word, Evernote or even plain paper. The important thing is that you have planned the format and the contents.

Step 2:

If your works of art are not in a digital format, take or have somebody else take excellent and clear photographs of your work for your online portfolio. Nobody will look twice at a portfolio with sloppy and bad quality photography.

Step 3

Write clear and short descriptions for each picture, that sums up the body of work displayed. Don’t hesitate to emphasize your strengths and techniques you have mastered.

Step 4

When your online portfolio is finished, go through it one more time and make sure there are no mistakes! An intricate portfolio gives an image of an established designer.

Step 5

Share it with the world! For extra convenience create a short URL with a service like bit.ly or goog.gl, so it’ll be easier to share on social media. Maybe you can even make business cards with your contact information and the link to your portfolio.

All of the aforementioned steps are possible with LiquidBlox, in an effective and easily manageable manner. When your portfolio is made with LiquidBlox, everybody has always an up-to-date version of your portfolio as the portfolio is updated real-time online. Click here to sign up!

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Recap of Myymälä and e-commerce 2016 fairs

Last week we attended the Myymälä (=physical store) 2016 and e-commerce 2016 fairs in Helsinki. The fairs were organized together with the aim to gather together retail professionals, buyers and suppliers, and decision makers of the digital era.

We had a traditional stand, but perhaps our biggest contribution was the official fair guide: easyfairs.liquidblox.com/TapahtumaOpas/2/. LiquidBlox worked together with EasyFairs, an international event organizer, to bring this product of collaboration into life.

The idea was that the guide would work on all devices, could be updated on real time and all exhibitors could update and change their information live during the event at the LiquidBlox booth. At the same time the fair guide worked as a live demo of our product at our stand. A few people commented on our bravery to run a live demo which was being updated on the go, but we really trust our software so much that we saw no issue. The fair visitors could browse the guide and use LiquidBlox software on the big screen of our fair stand.

At the same time the fair guide worked as a live demo of our product at our stand.

Overall our attendance of the fair was a success, we met friends old and new and the interest in our product was substantial.  And how do we know that it really was a success? Well, the fair guide had 3371 page views. Our website traffic went through the roof. So our idea of combining the traditional marketing method of a professional fair with a new digital marketing tool, our LiquidBlox software, was clearly a home run.

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Clothing boutique grew sales by 425% with content marketing

As we told in our earlier blog post, an old customer of ours Dressing Room - a small fashion boutique located in Helsinki, created a digital Christmas magazine for their customers. The earlier blog post told the story of how the online catalogue came first to be, and now we have some data about it’s impact on the sales and web traffic of Dressing Room.

First of all, their December sales grew by 425 compared to the previous December. That’s quite a lot. The publication was viewed roughly 2000 times, and while the webstore traffic saw only minor growth, the ‘quality’ of the traffic was clearly better than before. So the customers that clicked the link and read the online catalogue bought products from both the “brick and mortar” and web store.

The customers clearly liked the online catalogue. These are just some of comments Dressing Room received about the publication:

“An interesting way to showcase your products. Rosemunde was a previously unfamiliar brand for me and the magazine inspired me to make a purchase from the e-store.

“A new way of marketing. The magazine worked really well in mobile, how handy!”

“ The magazine really got me in a Christmas mood and I went to do shopping in the boutique. The article about Christmas traditions was really interesting.

And what did the staff of the Dressing Room say?

Liquidblox is a new and really interesting way to promote your company and it’s products. The software was really easy to use and didn’t require any IT-skills. Perfect for us really!

So the content marketing in the form of a online magazine made with LiquidBlox software really benefitted all parties involved: Customers got a well-received magazine to read, and Dressing Room got to market their holiday season products in a new and innovative way.

Start creating your online catalogue or magazine here

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Facebook got branded toward Google

Facebook recently came out with long awaited new “reaction” icons to display feelings more in depth than just the plain old thumbs up. The telegraph reports that the new feature has been tested in some countries. Reaction’s proper names according to Facebook are “Like, Love, Haha, Wow, Sad and Angry”.

For some reason a common order for icons to be shown in popular posts forms the color palette of Google logo’s three first letters. And actually also the last two, but it seems as Facebook only shows the three most clicked reactions with posts.

Is this something that just happened? Or was it intentional? The two competitors’ branding has always been quite different. Google has relied on the crazy bright colors that started with logo lettering and carried over to all current services. Take a look at the icons for Google Maps or Google Drive. Facebook has relied on the internet blue. Very same color (but different hue) that is used by likes of Twitter and LinkedIn. And of course LiquidBlox falls into same category.

This branding issue is probably not intentional nor a conspiracy. After all there is only six primary and secondary colors combined. If you try to do something with just bright colors, there is a good change you will look like Google. This is yet another early brilliant move by Sergey and Larry.

[liquidblox]

Make your catalogue both for print and web with our online catalogue software

The integration of digital and physical worlds is still in progress. As they say, old habits die hard. Many people still design their publications first for print, which are later converted to digital form. From the viewpoint of the online visitor or shopper, the result of this kind of solution is often less than optimal.

No responsiveness. If your publication doesn’t look good on every device, you won’t be taken seriously. Even search engines disregard poorly mobile competitive content.  No interaction. Would you like to click a link that goes straight to your own online store? Oops, not possible. A common phenomena is also to claim for the publication to be “mobile-friendly” when in reality you have to zoom in to be able the read the text. Not very handy and convincing, eh?

Online catalogue software  for multichannel publishing

Our mission here at LiquidBlox is to solve these problems and make creating catalogues and other publications online extremely easy. Publications that are made online should be remarkably easy to convert to print. Our software is easy to master and it creates catalogues, portfolios et cetera which are native to the web environment. What’s not to like?

Our HTML5-based in-browser editor/publishing tool enables anyone to save the digital version of a catalogue as a PDF file for print. As the picture below demonstrates, when you’re done with your creation our software offers you two choices: Publish the version online on our platform, or download it as A PDF to print out or to email to your customers.

Wondering about the size of your publication? A4 is one of most widely used sizes in publishing. Our software offers a handy marker to help you create exactly A4-sized publication. Just pay attention to the little marker on the edge of the page and your creation will be just the right size!

Happy publishing!

Sign up here and try it out!

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How to create a portfolio with LiquidBlox?

Are you an aspiring designer or an artist and want to showcase your talent to the world? Want to impress your potential future employer? A portfolio is a must-have. With LiquidBlox, creating your unique portfolio is easy and fast. Here’s why:

No need for (web) design skills - LiquidBlox user interface is simple and user-friendly

True responsiveness - works and looks good on all devices

You can easily distribute the URL to your portfolio or have it as a PDF file.

In-browser HTML5-based software - no need to install anything on your computer

Not impressed yet? Next we will show the steps on how to create a portfolio with LiquidBlox.

There are two ways about it. Use pre-made templates to get started. Or create everything by yourself. This post covers the latter. After all you are the designer.

Step1

Use the elements we call ‘blocks’ to compose the basic layout of your portfolio. In the next step you will fill these elements with the things you want, so think about the way you want to exhibit your creations. The broad trend today is to keep things simple and uncluttered, so don’t be afraid to spread the content on several pages. It’s all digital, even with the the FREE service plan you get a bunch of pages for your portfolio!

Step 2

Next, insert the content you want to showcase into the blocks and add explanatory text to describe your pieces of work. Our software will automatically scale the images and show them in the best quality whatever device the viewer uses. You can even link videos, if that’s your cup of tea, to play inside the portfolio!

Step 3

When you’re finally done and satisfied with your online portfolio created with LiquidBlox, you can make duplicates of the pages you first created to ensure a comprehensive layout for your portfolio. Finally, publish it to the world on our platform or make it a PDF file. Happy designing!

Sign up here and try it out!

Screen capture images in this post are from Inka porttila’s portfolio. Click here to check it out.

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CSS How-To: Gradient text backgound

With funky new CSS styles it’s like with any new design method: You need to see it used just right to buy it. This happened to me with -webkit-linear-gradient when browsing through Arctic Startup news flow. If you scroll down this article to the quote part - isn’t that sweet? 

The correct way to use the style is following:

h1 {  font-size: 72px;  background: -webkit-linear-gradient(#eee, #333);  -webkit-background-clip: text;  -webkit-text-fill-color: transparent; }

Make sure you have all the styles including -webkit-background-clip and -webkit-text-fill-color to make it work. And be aware that this is a webkit way of doing it. So eg. Firefox might need some fall back styles to be applied. 

We really need to consider adding gradient text CSS feature to LiquidBlox.com text editor.

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How to recreate TechCrunch logo with LiquidBlox layout tools

LiquidBlox has re-invented the digital magazine and the way it’s made. What would be a more appropriate way to put powerful layout editing tools to test than recreating the iconic TechCrunch logo with just HTML div elements. Or as we call them, blocks. 

LiquidBlox Founder Jani Hiltunen Walks you through the simple process of making the layout for the typography of the logo, adding green color to letters and previewing the result. 

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How to create an online catalogue with LiquidBlox?

So, you would like to create an online catalogue for your business or hobby? The process might seem hard to overcome. Complex software, hours of editing work and different file formats spring to mind. But worry not, as we have a solution to these headaches.

Very often catalogues and magazines are still created the same way as before the digital era of today. The publication is designed from the “print” view of things and then just converted to digital. Where’s the responsiveness? Where’s the scalability?

It is 2016 after all, so wake up people. If your publication is meant to be viewed online, then design it with an online-first mindset. The possible print-version can always be converted from it later.

And when thinking online, one must also think mobile. Especially young people are shunning away from the desktop-based web and consuming content solely on their smartphones and tablets. So make sure your online catalogue is responsive and looks good on all devices!

What follows next is a basic step-by-step tutorial of Liquidblox.

Stage 1

First create the basic layout for your online catalogue. Think about the items you want to showcase.

Stage 2

Next add the text and picture elements you want. Adjust the fonts and colors to match the rest of the online catalogue.

Stage 3

Once you have created a design element (we call them blocks) you like, it can be copied and pasted to reduce the amount of work. Just remember to change the texts and pictures accordingly!

Stage 4

You can even copy whole pages to duplicate the layout you’ve made. And when finished, just publish it in glorious, responsive and scalable HTML5-format or print it out as a PDF file.

Check out our example publications here: http://demo.liquidblox.com/Examples/10/Catalog

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How to make a magazine online without design skills?

What comes to your mind when you think about creating a magazine? Complex software that takes ages to master or clumsy online-based editors to create crude layouts? Here are some examples of different ways to create a magazine online.

The traditional way - Adobe InDesign

InDesign - the industry standard. Create a file and print it as a PDF file. But InDesign is fundamentally about creating magazines, brochures et cetera for print. So there really is next to no ways to create any interaction in the publication.

InDesign does have HTML export feature. However coding skills are needed to get the exported file published online. Mag+ is a plugin for converting InDesign files to iPad publications. Mag+ requires a viewer app to view publications created by the tool.

InDesign is extremely feature-heavy, the learning curve is pretty long. There’s always the trial and error method of learning, but really some kind of training is needed to fully utilize the software.

The similar, low-tech approach is to use Microsoft Powerpoint or a similar program to make a publication and then print it out as a PDF file, which is then uploaded to a cloud service for sharing. Crude, but gets the job done.

More finesse solution to display your PDF file online includes using one of many “flip-page-apps” such as issuu.com for the public consumption. When your magazine is ready, it is uploaded to be converted into web browsable format. But flip-page format is not the user-friendliest format there is. 

The main problem being that PDF pages are just converted into images to be shown on screen.

The responsiveness they claim is often also a bit hazy, as for example at mobile they just zoom the content instead of re-arranging the different layout elements properly. Sharing a certain page within the publication is also problematic, as is compatibility with Google’s services. The main problem being that PDF pages are just converted into images to be shown on screen.

The web-based alternative option

Ceros is a great service which enables you to make visually stunning publications. The user interface is simpler than that of InDesign. Visually powerful animated effects take a toll on devices with less performance. The pricing makes it a viable option only for big companies, so there’s that.

Another similar option with it’s own page building editor and native HTML5 output is Zmags. The way the final content is delivered reminds a lot like the “flip-page-apps” covered earlier lacking any real responsiveness. The pricing model is similar to Zmags little cousin Ceros.

How about a customized website as a magazine?

Wix is a popular website making platform, which provides tons of templates to choose from. Find one that fulfills your requirement and run your magazine as a dedicated web page. Squarespace is another similar service. They are reasonable priced but yet again, you must possess some understanding about web pages in order to create good-looking sites.

Wordpress is perhaps the world's’ most popular website blogging platform, and there are dozens of templates for magazine publishing directly on Wordpress. This approach can be recommended only if you already host a dedicated webpage with WP and thus you are able to use the complicated Wordpress platform.

How to make a magazine online with Liquidblox?

Liquidblox enables you to create a magazine online without any earlier design experience. Actually the magazine you are able to create with Liquidblox is a lot more than a traditional magazine published online. You can use is it as a standalone publication or embed it to your website. Full blown HTML5 pages work well with social media and search engines.

True responsiveness is also automatically done by our software and needs not to be worried about.

Simply create an account at our website (it only takes a few minutes) and start designing! The design tool will guide you through the basics on your first time. When you’re done, print it out as a PDF or make it available to your audience through our publishing platform. True responsiveness is also automatically done by our software and needs not to be worried about. So your publication is always mobile-compatible!

Check out our LiquidBlox explained video to understand how easy it is:

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Photographer portfolio

Inka Porttila is an extraordinary Finnish photographer. She has been granted access behind the well guarded curtain of professional sports and theatre.

Inka’s style of photography breaks the norm of traditional sports photography. Her work transmits vulnerability and emotion. Inka’s portfolio was made with LiquidBlox. There are images of such international stars as Rafael Nadal as well as some of the brightest sport stars in Finland.

“We set a goal to display Inka’s work as visually as possible in LiquidBlox format. Possibility to create-and-cut layout freely gives portfolio site a sense of uniqueness” explains LiquidBlox CEO Jani Hiltunen.

Portfolio was created using large images and a different layout in every page. Different layout variation were tested to suit the photos on the page. Playful use of empty space and aligning image elements to edge of the screen make portfolio site resemble a printed magazine.

Dialogue between image and text content is emphasized in LiquidBlox format

“LiquidBlox is amazing and easy tool for visual content. The pace of making new layouts makes it also fun. Dialogue between image and text content is emphasized in LiquidBlox format” says photographer Inka Porttila.

Click here to view Inka’s portfolio