| Transforming your words with Glossi.com |
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I make no attempt to disguise my recent love of Wattpad. I post stories there, I created a story competition site for it, I even created a Chrome app to streamline my Wattpad workflow. Yeah, I get it, I'm a nerd. Let's move on. Recently on the Wattpad Insider they had a feature about how Margaret Atwood and Naomi Alderman transformed their story, The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home into an illustrated short story. The story is quite wonderful even before they gave the first two chapters the Glossi treatment, but once I saw it spread out on the page with animations and bold fonts I was hooked. I had to make one of my own. Creating a GlossiSince Glossi is in a closed beta I first had to apply to get in. This gave me a chance to mull over a couple ideas. Initially I wanted to do a custom Glossi, probably focused on indie games, but I realized that this meant collecting and writing a lot of original content, and this has been a very busy month already. Then I realized that I could transform one of my own stories and skip the writing step. Glossi has an interesting system of adding, resizing, and attributing images. First you add a box to the page and then you either upload or choose a URL for the image you want to use in that space.This was the only part that felt a little clunky to me, but once I started using the Flickr creative commons search it became much easier. That let me just put in the URL for the images I wanted to use and the links would be populated automatically. Overall the process took me about an hour on my lunch break yesterday and then another hour and a half last night after the kids went to sleep. Not bad considering how nice the result is. I found most of the tools to be well thought out and easy to use, though at times I did find myself wanting a little bit finer control over things like padding and font size in the text areas. The ResultIt really isn't hard to make something that looks good using Glossi, and I think that is going to be their appeal. Right now the site has a strong presence in the categories of fashion, design, and art - but there is definitely room for more. Much more. Another nice feature is the ability to embed your Glossi, which I have done below. The Future is Looking GlossiI really think that they have a good thing going here, and I can see this taking off. I would definitely like to see a lot more nerdy content: cosplay magazines, arduino and other maker-related content, and indie games. If you try out Glossi and want me to have a look (or give you a fave) post a link in the comments below! |
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About Aaron Clifford
Last Updated on Thursday, 07 February 2013 22:48
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Indie Bug Blog