Going With the Flow

This past week I returned from a short but welcome Vagabond Adventure in Ontario’s rugged, windswept and peace-filled Georgian Bay area with a camera and iPhone filled with Group of Seven-ish snaps that wanted to be shared. But how?  Today’s technology and social media tools now make it simple, fun and easy to share our adventures in a myriad of ways. The challenge is to narrow down the choices to find the best application to tell your visual story. Today I thought I would share my Great Northern Cottage Adventure with you through one of my favourite presentation tools, Flowboard.

Flowboard is an interactive iPad app that helps you tell visually compelling stories in a way Powerpoint and blogs cannot. The app is intuitive and makes creating visual stories both tactile and fun. You are provided with a number of customize-able templates such as scrapbooks, photo albums, school reports, business presentations, recipes, portfolios, and case studies. For the design adventurers, you can also create your own template from scratch based on your specific needs. I actually chose a vintage-y e-book template as my base for this project as many of the template’s backgrounds matched the vintage shots I took along the road with Instagram. I had already transferred all of my camera and iPhone photos to my iPad using Dropbox. I rubbed my hands together and began telling my story frame by frame.

You soon learn through using the Flowboard app that information is meant to be touched! You can tell your story with a variety of media such as photos, video, embedded URLs and words just by tapping the screen and making wise design and content decisions. The application lets you make use of the iPad’s typical gestures such a pinch and zoom, allowing you to resize and move visuals and text blocks on the page easily. As you know, my personal toolkit includes a photography, business and education mix and I can certainly see applications for Flowboard in each. Once you have built your story you can then share it through Facebook, Twitter, and e-mail. You can view your story on a desk top or on your iPad. Without further ado, I will share mine with you here!

In next week’s post I will dig deeper into each visual story you will find on my Great Northern Cottage Adventure Flowboard, including a compelling visit to Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island, where I learned about an inspiring theatre group dedicated to telling the stories of the Anishinaabeg culture. You can check them out here, or wait for my post next week. As always, thanks for visiting!