Adobe Slate and other new storytelling platforms

I’ve been in love with the elegance and free-ness of the Adobe Voice app for nearly a year now.  It’s one of the easiest strategies I’ve seen for creating effective video stories.  This week, Adobe introduced an equally elegant tool for digital publishing–for those times you want to tell a non-video story, largely based on images.

Built for the iPad, Adobe Slate allows users to easily and beautifully transform documents into stories using impressive imagery, design themes, and motion.  Build your story using photos, text, links or photos.  You can search for Creative Commons images, grab images from your iPad, use its camera, or choose stored images from Lightroom, Creative Cloud or Dropbox and position those images in a variety of ways.  Videos may not be added.

Documents are easily embedded, emailed or shared on social media.

This just may become my new go-to app for posters, invitations, announcements, marketing.  I can see students using it to share the results of research projects and to promote causes and events. I can see photography students leveraging this as a portfolio tool.

This video shares how teacher Joe Dockery uses Adobe Slate to encourage students to share what they’ve learned and curate portfolios.

Slate is not the only choice in this visual storytelling subgenre.

Microsoft’s Sway is another elegant image-based storytelling/presentation platform now in preview. Sway labels itself s a polished, interactive canvas for sharing your ideas and integrates with Microsoft suite assets.  The web-based version allows users to add text, headings, tweets, embed code and images in a variety of layouts and organize content in vertical or horizontal orientations. Block quotes, image grids, and video are coming soon.  I really like the cool stack feature for images and the immediate mood remixes.  Viewers scroll through Sways as they would websites or Powerpoints.

Yet another presentation tool that allows users to share video as well as image is Storehouse.  An established app with a library of examples and great reviews, Storehouse allows each story to contain up to 50 images, as well as short videos (30 seconds or less).  Check out the examples from National Geographic.

Filed under: Adobe Slate, digital storytelling, posters