5 free tools to give your digital catalogs that extra touch

Marketing & sales is a high-paced game:

We need to use our time as efficiently as possible and one way we can accomplish this is to use the best tools in our daily work. Here are five tools that can help you quickly make your digital flipbooks really stand out from the competition.

There are a lot of tools that can help you to enhance your flipbooks. But at the same time, too many tools can be the very reason you don't start your day in an effective manner. So, here we will present some of the tools we have collected at iPaper and use extensively when we create our very own flipbook catalogs.

1: That perfect blurred background image

An excellent effect that can really make your branded flipbook stand out, is to place a blurred image in the background. This ensures that your messages in the online catalog will be set in a unique environment.

Here is a great example:

You can easily make this effect yourself without having access to expensive tools like Photoshop. Two great examples of free photo editor providers are Befunky and Canva that are very easy to use.

2: What is the hex-code for that logo color?

This is a classic obstacle for many of us. You want to use the exact same color you just saw for your online catalog. But heck, what is that hex code? Not many of us are able to remember those six digit numbers. Eyedropper to the rescue! Eyedropper makes it possible for you to find the exact hex code of a pixel of a web page or your flipbook catalog and apply that color somewhere else.

3: Icons that send a clear message

Icons seem to be all over both web and digital publications. And there's a good reason for that. Icons help us to better understand the presented information. Basically, icons support the written message of your content. As you've probably noticed there are a ton of different icons online. Some are free and some are not. You can find some really nice free icons - if you know where to look. The help you all out we have gathered our favourite assets to use when enriching online catalogs for you to download for free!

This includes +2.300 assets featuring:

• icons
• loading gifs
• backgrounds
• illustrations

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4: Make your PDF ready for publishing

iPaper flipbooks are based on an existing PDF-based publication or file. So from time to time it can be very beneficial to be able to edit this PDF before you publish your digital publication in a flipbook. It could be situations where you need to convert JPEGs to PDF, combine a number of PDFs to one single PDF file, rotate or crop the PDF, and numerous other things.

With PDF.io you get a multitude of free tools that can perform these tricks on PDF files before you convert the PDF to a flipbook.

5: The iPaper Tools

Here at iPaper we have also made a tool to help you with some common tasks when publishing your catalogs as digital flipbooks. You can find these tools here.

At the moment you find the following iPaper tools:

DPI Calculator

How do you make a catalog with the best image quality? You can calculate the perfect DPI (dots per inch) resolution you need to create your PDF in, to make it as snappy for the user without compromising the quality of the catalog view and readability.

PDF Splitter

The iPaper PDF Splitter is the perfect tool if your existing PDF is generated as spreads and not as single pages. This tool will quickly split your spreads to the needed single pages for your iPaper flipbook.

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Need to get the full overview?

Explore our Complete Guide to Digital Catalogs (All You Need To Know!)