The company he started, BC Pictures, is one of dozens, even hundreds that utilize PDFs in brochure creation. But Connolly wasn't content to do what the others did—stuffing text onto a page, scaling photos into tiny images for faster downloading, and keeping the file size as small as possible. Instead, he decided to go in the opposite direction.

His projects, for clients like Volvo Car Corp. and the government of Aruba, are big, meaty files jam-packed with images and as little text as possible. Like glossy printed brochures, they vibrate with color and striking photography.

But, because they're created as PDFs, they have electronic advantages over their printed kin. Connolly inserts video clips into the files, making interactive e-books that can span 200 pages in length and have the feel of a TV, Web, and print combo and yet are like nothing else in the industry.

"This is the future," said Connolly. "People have been so afraid to explore what can be done with PDFs, because they think users won't download big files. But what we've found in creating these media-rich projects is that there's just about no limit to the file size that people will download. They want richer, more robust content, and they'll be happy to wait through the download for it."

Getting Started

Perhaps Connolly doesn't think like many designers because he didn't start out as one. A musician turned record producer, he then became a music video producer before going into the film business.

For the past 15 years, he's worked with his wife on making travel television shows. Just after the pair got started with those production duties, Connolly wanted to make the video cases for the shows snazzier, so he went to Linotype Co., which had a desktop publishing system.

"They gave me a demonstration that was dreadful," he said. "It took two hours just to rip one page."

But out of an excruciating demo came a bright idea. Connolly proposed making a video that would train people in how to use its products, and when Linotype agreed, Connolly ended up making several training videos for the company over 13 years. It became an education by vicarious means. Linotype worked with PDFs and Postscript, so as Connolly made the training videos, he became very familiar with the use of desktop publishing and how it was being handled.

Although he was gaining valuable insight, Connolly didn't start putting his knowledge to use until 2000, when Bell Canada announced a grant to deliver television via the Internet. Since this was before high-speed access had really taken off, Bell Canada wasn't sure how to get its programs online, only that it believed the Internet was the future, and it didn't want to miss out on appealing to Web surfers.

BC Pictures applied for, and received, one of the $300,000 grants, and got additional funding from Adobe and the Canadian government. Other grant recipients shot toward HTML and Flash, focusing on how to compress video effectively for a Web page. But Connolly had different ideas.

"I chose to try and figure out how to put a TV program inside a PDF file," he said. "I knew it would be cool if you could watch a show, and then go online and download an e-book that had clips and text."

There was just one problem. At the time, it wasn't possible to embed media inside a PDF file. Instead, Connolly created a way for an e-book reader to click on an image within a PDF file and have it stream in from a Web site. With multiple iterations of Adobe Reader over the years, and the rise in broadband use, Connolly's work kept getting more refined, and once Adobe InDesign was released, his projects took off.

Looking Ahead

In addition to working with Bell Canada, BC Pictures began to make interactive brochures for car companies, travel destinations and NASA.

Connolly has gotten kudos for design from users, who like the way the brochures launch full screen and have minimal toolbars, making them look more like an electronic art book than a typical PDF document.

For each project, Connolly makes two PDF versions—a "standard" one that has no rich media and comes in under 5MB, and a "full" version that includes everything he can think to throw into it, including links, video, photos and text. He said he aims to have the full versions be as interactive as CD-ROMs, with users clicking as much as possible to explore the material.

Although it's become common in the industry to hear that users shy away from larger file downloads, Connolly can say firsthand that he's seen the opposite. "About 70 percent of the people that have a choice with our brochures take the full version," he said. "They want the whole enchilada."

Now Connolly is ready to take on even more challenges in making PDFs the choice for interactive content. He's been working on setting up deals with musicians so fans can put together tailored PDFs, choosing which music lyrics, audio clips, photos and videos they want to include.

This type of do-it-yourself PDF content is the next wave, Connolly said, allowing online users to bring together different forms of interactive material to fashion their own e-books.

"There's so much that can still be done, that it's very exciting," he said. "The big picture that we're seeing for this technology is just amazing."

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