Live Happy Magazine

Live Happy, a company that celebrates living a happy life, brought on a team at Bates Creative (now Beyond Definition) to convert their print magazine into a digital app. I was contracted through the Gigawatt Group to fine tune the UX/UI and develop their magazine's app from print in only three days.

ROLE
UX/UI Design
Frontend Development

DURATION
3 Days
live happy magazine app

The Unhappy Reality

Live Happy Magazine had seen a shift from print to digital over the years. In an effort to compete in the growing digital market, they decided to create a mobile app called "Live Happy: Digital Edition." I was in charge of converting the print magazine into an Product app which was tested/previewed in AEM Preflight.

google play icon apple store icon
live happy magazine with man suffocating in stuffed animals
Grace, Gratitude, and Garcelle magazine spread with a woman dancing

Challenges Going Digital

three magazine spreads of live happy magazine
  1. Length of Content

    The common magazine spread is 16 3⁄4” x 10 7⁄8” while the average phone height at the time of creation was 4-5.5 inches. Condensing this information into a smaller device without overloading the user with content became a challenge.

  2. Responsive Sizes

    Unlike magazines that are printed at a set size, digital devices range in sizes forcing us to make several interpretations of the magazine from phone to tablet.

  3. Fonts

    The fonts used for print were made for print, not the web. Some print fonts that had a web license were converted to the proper file format while others were converted to a similar-looking Google Font.

  4. Accessibility

    Converting to digital introduced a new level of accessibility, especially when it came to images, color contrast, and sizing. Many of the images needed to be converted to a web-friendly version (alt text, font conversion from image, etc.) while text needed to be adapted to different screen sizes.

Solution and Digital Perks

Going digital not only allowed us to reach a larger audience, it also allowed us to do things we weren’t able to do in print.

Animations

Static images came to life with animation, allowing us to highlight a section or communicate an idea with motion.

app featuring live happy magazine podcast

New Advertisements

While ads stayed the same in print, digital ads allowed us to feature new products at any date, such as their new podcast.

Interactions

Interactions allowed us to condense large amounts of info into manageable chunks that users could control.