How to Publish Slick and Stylized Visual Stories in Minutes with Adobe Slate

What is Adobe Slate?

Adobe Slate is a brand new app for iPad that makes it easy to build visual stories—combinations of text and images that can be published online. In just a few minutes, you can use your own images and text to create stories that can be shared over the web to every platform.

Slate is a free download for iPad, and publishing your stories online is free as well. You can check out an example of a story built with Slate here.

1. Get Started

Create a Story

To get started with Slate, download the app using the App Store. You can kick off your story by choosing to Create a New Story.

Select a Cover Image

After you've launched your first story, Slate's intuitive interface will guide you naturally through creation. Typically, you'll set the cover photo — the image at the top of the story — and add text overlays.

Adobe Slate Cover Photo — First, you'll set the cover photo at the top of the Slate story. Slate has the option to set the way the image will appear in both portrait and landscape mode.

2. Edit Your Story

When selecting images in Slate, you'll have the option to use images from a variety of sources. You can even use the images stored on the iPad, or a variety of cloud options.

Adobe Slate Image Sources — One of my favorite features of Adobe Slate is the ability to pull in images from practically any source, whether it's a Lightroom collection synced to the cloud or images in Dropbox.

Creating stories in Slate entails adding a series of content blocks. You can choose between adding a Photo, Text, Links, or Photo Grids, one after another. The user interface is an intuitive and easy way to build these stories.

Add Content Block — Content blocks drive the Adobe Slate interface. As you scroll down the story that you're building, you'll always have the option to tap and add another content block. Choose between Photos, Text, Links, and Photo Grids to add more sections to your visual stories.

3. Publish Your Story

Before publishing your Slate story, check out the built-in themes. These are one-click options to change the visual appearance of your story. In one tap, you will change the font and color scheme of the story. Don't worry, you can always revert to the default theme.

Adobe Slate Themes — Adobe Slate features a number of themes that change both the color scheme and font with just one tap.

To publish, press the Share button at the top of the application. Slate will prompt you to enter some basic options and the option to share your images. Once you enter these options, your Slate story will be posted online and accessible through any web browser.

Tap to share — Tap the share button to prompt the share dialog.

The Share Your Story dialog will prompt you for some basic information regarding your Story. At the bottom of the options, you can simply copy the link to your clipboard as I've shown here, or you can share it directly to your social media accounts.

Wrapping Up

Slate is a a new tool for building compelling stories using your own photography. Not only are the finished products visually impressive, this might be the quickest way yet to build mini-sites using imagery. Adobe's Slate application will find a spot in my workflow for easy to assemble stories for my clients.