Flipbook
A digital flipbook viewer that turns static PDF catalogs and brochures into a fluid, page-turning web experience - embeddable on any storefront, optimised for mobile, and built so a non-technical team can upload a new edition, share a link, and track engagement without involving a developer.
Project overview
Flipbook is a digital flipbook viewer that turns static PDF catalogs, brochures, and magazines into a fluid, page-turning web experience. It is built for the teams who already produce print collateral - retailers, distributors, agencies - and want their existing PDFs to feel like a premium online product without commissioning a full custom microsite for every new edition.
The challenge
Print collateral and the web have always been mismatched: a beautifully designed catalog PDF becomes a clunky, scroll-locked download the moment it hits a website. Existing flipbook tools solve the rendering problem but tend to fail elsewhere - heavy on desktop, broken on mobile, hard to embed cleanly, and built around feature creep that non-technical teams never use. The goal was a focused tool: upload a PDF, get a fast, mobile-first flipbook with a clean reader UI and an embed snippet that drops into any site.
Discovery & strategy
We mapped the actual workflow of the people uploading content - marketing managers and brand teams - not the engineers building it. That meant a one-screen upload flow, automatic page extraction, and a default reader UI good enough that nobody needs to configure it. The architecture was scoped around the two paths content takes: into the system (PDF ingest → page extraction → optimised image set) and out of it (embedded reader, public share link, mobile fallback).
Design process
A reader UI that feels closer to a luxury catalog than a developer tool: smooth page-turn animation, double-page spread on desktop, single-page on mobile, pinch-zoom for product detail, and minimal chrome so the catalog content stays the hero. Controls are intentionally restrained - page thumbnails, jump-to-page, full-screen, share. The dashboard for content owners uses a calm, library-style layout where each book is a card with an upload time, page count, share link, and basic engagement signals.
Development execution
Built as a Next.js application with server-side PDF processing that extracts pages into an optimised image set, ready for fast lazy-loaded delivery. The reader animation runs on the GPU so page-turn stays smooth on mid-range mobile devices, and the embed snippet ships as a lightweight iframe with no external dependencies. Hosting is on Vercel with object storage for source PDFs and rendered assets, sized so a small team can run a library of catalogs without thinking about infrastructure.
Technology stack
Outcomes
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