Article helps you to tell your story in a fast and easy way, without stressing too much about design and layout. All that is taken care for you through a few easy-to-select options. You can build an article quickly through combining photos, videos, text , maps, even music and more. You can also publish your Articles to Facebook as Instant Articles, which means they are treated as native content and load instantaneously on your audience’s phones.
Here’s how you use it:
Start your story by tapping on the + symbol, choose your picture or video to open your story, and a little title and introductory text.
Next, experiment with changing the look and feel of you story by choosing for the selection of styles baked into the app.
Keep building your story by adding new image and video elements, but experiment and change the order according to what you think works. If your image or video has location data already attached, then you can easily tap on the option to add a map - the app automatically reads the location data. All you need to do is add a title. Add crops and frames to your images to tailor and focus your look and add interest. You can easily add text to directly to media too - so you won’t need to go outside the app to achieve that.
Here’s some tips to help you get the most out of the app.
1. Choose a series of 6-8 pictures and / or videos
Try to pick a varies et of pictures, and add in one or two videos if you can., They’re rendered really nicely on the app, and the surprise of movement helps to really engage your audience
2. Keep it light
Article is set up for you to write in between the pictures, so that your readers can follow the story as they scroll down. But keep it relatively light on the text, and people will be able to see the leading edge of the next picture below - that’ll get them curious and keep them scrolling down to the next part of your story.
3. Add a widget for variety
Article has a cool feature to let you add styles, frames, text formatting and more. This helps you to create themes and links between your story elements to keep your audience interested and engaged. It’s easy for you to pick engaging styles, re-order your elements, and add maps, text on media, and more - and most of this is accessed through simple drag-and-drop or tapping., It’s lovely to use.
4. Add maps
If your Article is about a particular location, the app makes it really easy for you to add a map to a photo or video and that makes it interactive content. Very cool.
Some big players are starting to use the app, like The Economist Magazine and National Geographic - so you can also access their content through the app, and get inspiration that way. Unfortunately, it’s only available on the iOS app store, but Steller - another storytelling app but the same develop, is available on both Android and Apple app stores for free.
Conclusion
What do you think about Article? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below.
Download Article (Free):
I’m Sarb Johal, and I take a lot of photographs. I’ll be posting a blog Photography tools and apps blog column weekly, every Tuesday.
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