Issuu's Reader Experience with Beautiful Details

Written by Alette Holmberg-Nielsen, Issuu Senior Product Owner

When we set out to completely overhaul the reading experience with the #newissuu last fall, we were under a lot of pressure to make sure we improved the speed, reliability and usability of a platform that reaches 100 million uniques every month. Also, I knew that one of the top things publishers and readers appreciate about Issuu is the clean, professional and beautiful way publications look on Issuu. It wasn’t an option to lose that. On the contrary, we felt like we had so much more beauty to add to the reading experience.  

We launched our beautiful new reading experience last fall, and it’s time to share a few tweaks we made since then. These are the beautiful little details that makes issuu the perfect surroundings for publications like Quality Time, Søstrene Grene and Sauce Magazine. These details might seem small and unimportant, but the sum of them ends up making a world of difference.

Refining our Flipbook Experience

Read anything on Issuu on any device and take a close look at how the page moves when you flip it. Especially on touch-screen devices, you’ll see that the page follows your finger no matter what direction you drag. This really makes it feel a little more like the real thing. We’ve also slowed down the animation just a bit – a few hundred milliseconds – to enable the eye to easier follow the movement. An animation like this might look easy, once done right – but there is a huge amount of math involved. (If you’re curious start with this paper)

What’s really special about the Issuu Flipbook is the actual 3D bending of the page being flipped. Most off-the-shelf page- flip animations rely on 2D tricks to make it look a little like bending. But they all end up feeling flat. If you look closely on the images or text while flipping a page, you will see it. A tiny thing, that makes a big difference.

Crisper Images and Text

One of the most exciting changes from the #newissuu launch was how the text is crystal clear at all zoom levels. Our advanced rendering of layers of text and images makes reading very easy on the eyes, even when you zoom way in. No fuzziness here! We’ve recently refined this even more to make sure that no matter what font you throw at us, we will be able to display it perfectly. The freedom to create something unique is what makes the publication on Issuu so special.

Zoom in and experience crystal-clear fonts in this publication:

Read Anywhere

This great Issuu reading experience works no matter what device you’re on. You can read issuu.com in your web browser on your phone, or download our apps tailor-made for Android and iOS.  No matter the platform, we’re always tweaking Issuu to make it easier to read and more beautiful to publish on.

Beautiful Details for Beautiful Publications

We care for these details because more than 3 million publishers so far chose Issuu for their inspiring, jaw-dropping and incredible publications. We are committed to making Issuu the absolute best place to publish, find and read the best digital publications.