Why You Must Use Adobe’s Slate App
Slate is the newest free app by Adobe for iPad that makes it easy to create professional looking presentations on the go. Adobe’s software used to be complicated and time consuming to use, but a new wave of launches has brought lightweight apps to mobile devices which are more user friendly and convenient than ever before.
Adobe Slate turns simple images and words into beautiful stories and presentations that can be saved and shared with colleagues and clients. Slate allows you to upload your own photos from a range of services and place them into predesigned themes and templates. Rearranging and resizing the images is easy and you have a number of options such as creating a grid, a full width photo, aligning it square with text or placing it into a window that appears as the viewer scrolls down the page. You can then add your own titles and text with a range of fonts to create something that looks professional but personal. In addition, you can add audio soundbites to give your finished stories a multimedia and multisensory appeal.
The stories are not just static text and images such as with a PDF but have motion and a magazine feel, allowing designers to pour their creativity into a digital story rather an a plain and boring document. The ability to create these presentations while not in the studio adds a new level of convenience to presenting ideas and creating mock ups, plus the presentations look almost like a full website in themselves.
One of the best Adobe Slate features for designers is that you can add buttons to your presentations that link to a webpage. This allows you to link to your own website or portfolio, to a page where there is more information on an idea you talk about in your presentation, or maybe to an inspiration board. This feature isn’t available in other creative layout apps and allows you to make your creations more viewer-friendly.
One of the main reasons why designers should use Adobe Slate above any other similar app is the range of options for sharing the presentation once it’s been finished. Your finished layouts are saved to Adobe’s cloud so you don’t need to take up precious room on your iPad. From there, the files can be shared by sending colleagues a web link via text or email, by sharing directly to Twitter or Facebook, or by creating an embed code which can be used on websites and in blog posts. The presentations automatically adapt the story to the device, so viewers will get a great experience whether they’re reading on a smartphone, tablet or computer.
Slate is the sister to Adobe’s year old Voice app which allows users to create animated videos right from their iPad using a simple and lightweight interface. The combination of these two apps means that designers can create multimedia presentations and stories easily, even if their specific skillset lies elsewhere. Although Slate is currently limited to 11 themes and doesn’t allow videos to be embedded, Adobe is working on improvements and updates as the user base grows. Plus, the options for a combination of images and text is limitless, allowing for any number of original designs to be born from the same layout.
Adobe Slate’s simplicity and ease of use shouldn’t be a reason to put professional designers off trying out this app, in fact it should be a reason in itself for downloading it. Slate is a refreshing alternative to the complications of InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop which designers use everyday, and anything that speeds up a task definitely shouldn’t be sniffed at.
While regular iPad consumers may be at a loss as what they could use the app for, designers will already have ideas from mini portfolios to event invites to client proposals. Along with Voice, Slate may be the start of a new type of toolkit for designers- one that’s portable, requires no training to use and is above all free.
Adobe Slate is free to download for iOS on iPad.
