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You may remember Voice, the Adobe app that creates animated videos using your own voice recordings. Now Adobe is releasing a sister app to Voice, called Slate, that lets you create a story with visuals and design elements.
The company says Slate should make creating newsletters and reports easier. Slate lets you add your own text and pictures into a variety of layouts to create a visually striking document. Theme and font options help you gear the feel of your presentation, perhaps a professional direction for a report or a more playful feel for a photo album.
Users can add buttons to their creations, allowing readers to click and be sent to a personal website, product page, and the like. Once created, the documents link can be shared or embedded.
Slate appears to allow for more usable features than a PDF and adds more visual appeal. Instead of plain boring text with some pictures thrown in, Slate documents have a magazine-style design and motion, as Adobe puts it. This feature is supposed to make documents move and feel more alive.
Adobe claims that Slate automatically adapts to the device upon which a document is being read: tablet, laptop, or smartphone.
Adobe is placing an emphasis on Slate’s ease of use, claiming you don’t require any design skills to get results. Unfortunately, this also means control is limited. So customizing layouts will not be possible.
This lack of control may not bother many users who just want an app that creates attractive documents easily. However, those with more design skills may find it frustrating.
Interested parties will be pleased to know that both Slate and Voice are free. No subscription is necessary. Slate is not a part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud. However, both apps require at least iOS 8.1.2 and an iPad 2 or higher to use.
Image: Adobe
Aira Bongco
I think that the release of this is timely as people are now more inclined to look at animated content. Just like infographics and images, people are also more inclined to look at videos.