Want to explore more about Interactive Indesign

[Yogendran5FEA]

Hi Guys, 

I Just want to explore interactive indesign capability.  Can we create interactive email newsletter, emailer in indesign, Please provide some best of best examples projects, so i can get inspired and learn.  

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

This is a steadily rising area of interest. However, the short answer is that InDesign is not really the best platform to develop interactive content, nor (outside of few strengths) even a good one.

The absolutely key element, which is often overlooked until too late, is that an interactive presentation must have a platform that supports that interactivity. You can't simply build a digital document, even using an app's animation and link and native interactive features, and have it work on any device or platform; it probably won't even work on most. This is especiallyt true given that most designers' goal is productions that will work on mobile devices in one way or another... and the platforms in phones and tablets are among the weakest, least capable ones out there.

If you want to build interactive productions, start with the end platform and hardware, and find tools and methods that work on it. Each will have different ones, even for email and web, much less anything meant to work like a standalone app. There are very few "generic" interactive development tools, and InDesign is not one of them.

That said, you can do fairly elaborate interactive work in InDesign if you use the Publish Online platform, which is not portable to other platforms (that is, you have to send users directly to the content hosted on that site/platform), or if you design for PDF export that will be used only on desktop Acrobat (not any other PDF reader, viewer or clone). And... that's about it.

(And more or less, forget about interactivity in EPUB. It's difficult to achieve and depends enormously on the reader used.)

If this is all disappointing, you are probably thinking of the interactive productions that can be built as a mobile device app or on a specific interactivity support platform. Very few generic document or layout tools can reach those levels of sophistication, and they can't do it on generic platforms like PDF or EPUB (or even, without a lot of work and help, HTML).

[rayek.elfin]

Hi Guys, 

Can we create interactive email newsletter, emailer in indesign,

No. NOT POSSIBLE. However, you can create a visual design for your newletter and then have a developer convert the design. You cannot create a working version that actually 'works' in InDesign.

Also: email newletters do not support interactivity. Only if you link from an email to an external URL with a server-side application can that be achieved. Even static email newsletters based on a single image often fail to work effectively for recipients, because many email clients turn off images by default when they receive email from unknown senders. And the html that InDesign produces isn't suitable for email newsletters either. So it needs to be recoded.

In short: not worth the time or effort.

Please provide some best of best examples projects, so i can get inspired and learn.  

By @Yogendran5FEA

Sorry, there are no example projects for interactive email newsletters made in InDesign, because that is impossible. But you could google general newsletter designs or mockups, both paper as well as email designs..

At any rate: designing a visual mockup for an email newsletter design is better done in Illustrator, Photoshop, or (preferred nowadays): Figma.