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How to optimize a PDF for mobile devices
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by MATT STOKES | JULY 27, 2017
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One of my clients is a political organization that wanted to distribute its recommendations to voters on Election Day. Traditionally, this would be a “punch card”—a pocket-sized piece of sturdy cardboard paper clipped from a mailer or a newspaper ad. But we had a short turnaround time and we wanted to do something a little more modern, so we came up with the idea of encouraging voters to use their phones in the voting booth and pull up this organization’s recommendations that way.
I designed a nice-looking list of recommendations but, once I’d saved it as a PDF and pulled it up on my phone, I was frustrated that it wouldn’t fit a mobile screen.
I wanted the image to appear designed for mobile phones—because, after all, that was its point for being. So I recreated the list in Adobe Illustrator as a graphic, using the dimensions for the most popular smart phones. I exported the final image as a PDF, pulled it up on my phone, and just like that, I’d found a quick, elegant solution.
Final product ready to go, we uploaded the PDF to the organization’s website, and voters were able to enter the voting booth and pull up a sleek PDF optimized just for their phones.
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