A print magazine that reads just as well on a phone
PrintWebsite
Carolina Public Health comes out every spring and the Impact Report every fall, for a school whose readers are alumni, donors, faculty and the public health workforce. Five years of issues now, designed for print and built for the web in the same pass. The same partnership produced the school's own site, mark and print system.
A magazine is a fixed object: a page size, a page order, a stack of paper. The web is none of those things. The work here is the translation, so that a story laid out across a spread still holds together on a phone on a bus, and so the issue is readable by people the printed copy was never going to reach. The magazine is one piece of a decade of work inside UNC.
So grateful for Adrial’s creativity, excellent design, and outstanding customer service. He is masterful and an essential part of our team.
Barbara K. Rimer, DrPHDean Emerita, UNC Gillings School of Global Public HealthThe issue
A real magazine, twice a year, for about forty thousand people
Carolina Public Health goes to alumni, donors, faculty and the public health workforce. Long-form reporting, commissioned photography, the kind of thing people keep on a desk for a month. Six spreads from one issue run here, feature openers and a photo essay, so you can see how an issue is paced.
- Faculty features: Ryan Cronk, on water, sanitation and hygiene
- Staff features: Rhesia Lewis and Greg Bocchino, on careers at Gillings
- N.C. First Lady Anna Stein on care and community
- How do I talk about AI in public health?
- From the dean: “Take care” is something we say almost automatically
- Taking public health to the street
Built to be read across two pages
Display type set at the size a spread can carry, a photograph given the room to work, and a sidebar that does not fight the main story. This is the part that is genuinely different from designing for a screen: the reader sees both pages at once and the composition has to hold at that width.
The translation
The same story, rebuilt rather than scanned
Every article gets its own page, with the headline, the standfirst, the issue it came from and the categories it belongs to. The spread's composition does not survive the move and should not: what survives is the story, in a form the web is actually good at.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Any screen
On a phone, it is still the magazine
The masthead, the pull quotes, the photography and the typographic hierarchy all come through at 390 pixels wide. This is the whole point of the exercise. A PDF of a spread on a phone is a pinching exercise; this is something somebody reads on a bus, which is where most of this audience actually is.
Readable by machines too
Text that reflows, and structure a screen reader can follow
Headings that are headings, images with descriptions, and type that reflows to whatever width it lands on. The structure underneath is what lets somebody using a screen reader skip to the section they want.
Both at once
The printed page points at its own web edition
Every spread carries VIEW ONLINE and a short link in the corner. Somebody reading the paper copy can get to the version they can share, and the two editions stop being separate products that happen to carry the same words.
Portable
And the whole issue is still a download
View as PDF sits under the cover on every issue's own page, back to 2019. Translating a magazine for the web does not mean taking the magazine away from the people who liked it as a magazine.
Five years deep
An archive of 242 articles, filtered three ways
Keyword, issue and category, over everything published since 2022. A printed back issue is in a cupboard. This is the part of the translation that pays off slowly and then keeps paying: a story from four springs ago is still findable by somebody who needs it today.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
The other half of the year
The Impact Report, every fall
The companion publication, and the reason this is a relationship and not a project: five of them now, each designed in print and carried onto the site the same way. The magazine in spring, the report in fall, the same readers, the same shelf.
Beyond the page
Photo essays, which print could not hold
Some stories are twenty photographs, and a magazine has room for three. These run on the site as their own form, managed by the school's own team. It is the one place where the digital edition is not translating the print one, but doing something the paper never could.
The client edits this themselves, in the CMS
Under the hood
The school publishes it
Articles, issues and photo essays are the team's to add and edit. An issue going live is their afternoon, not a ticket to me.
Findable, which paper is not
Every article is its own page with its own address, so search engines index it and anyone can send a link directly to a story.
Five years in one place
Two issues a year since 2022, all on the same site under the same filters, and not a folder of PDFs per year.
The PDF is still there
Every full issue remains downloadable from its own articles, for readers who want the printed object and for the school's own records.
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Your great work deserves to look great.
Twenty-five minutes. Tell me what you're trying to do and who needs to see it, and I'll tell you what I'd build first and roughly what it costs.