I started playing with Issuu to see what it can and could do. It’s basically a PDF Reader on steroids. If you click the “full screen” icon above, you’ll see what I mean.

I’m testing it out here with photos from a project I began last September called Subway.

The layout of the images was handled with Apple’s iPhoto. Basically, you can create “books” with your photos, so I did. Then I went to print it as a PDF, saved and uploaded, and what you have above is the result. Pretty cool.

By comparison, here’s what Flickr does with the same content. It’s a little bit of an apple and robots comparison though because Flickr is just showing us the images. They aren’t laid out like in the PDF.

Now, why actual publications are using Issuu is a bit confusing. It’s not intuitive, doesn’t lead to further content exploration and basically blows aside from the cool factor of having flippy pages.

Or put another way, I think it works well for graphics and images but if you visit Issuu and start exploring, you’ll see a number of magazines that are are print heavy using the platform. Unfortunately, these text heavy publications just don’t work on the platform. It becomes an interface pain in the yahoodle as you zoom in, out and over to read things.

My intuition is that designers are pushing organizations towards it because they can maintain their layouts. But as far as usability goes, this isn’t what we should be focusing on.

Instead, it’s a neat trick to play with our friends and family.