Shorthand: The scrollytelling cheat

It is my big dream working on those great parallax stories the Reuters or The New York Times do. While there is usually a lot of coding and a whole team behind these, you can also use some cheats and make your own quite easily. One of these cheats is called Shorthand.

I was always a bit obsessed with natural disasters and reading about the OK 2019 asteroid, I knew what's my next project. At about the same time, I've found the Shorthand builder and thought I could practice with it until I learn the coding part. The website also claims the BBC, Reuters and other great news organizations have used their help in the past.

The platform has three basic plans, cheapest one starting at £24 a month. There's basic site hosting and analytics included. However, if you want to try first and find out if this really is for you, you can do so with a free trial that allows you to do everything you want ... except publish.

This seems like a really good idea as you can really try what you can do with the platform and commit to it just when you know you want to hit the button. Your team can join the workspace (if you have any) and you can start adding the sections to the story.

In the trial version, you can choose between seven basic types of section. Apart from text and media sections, you can use for example background scrollmation and classic scrollmation. Combining these into story up to 25 sections long, you can really do some magic even without single line of JavaScript. Unfortunately, the most valuable sections are part of the prime plan costing £120 a month.

Overall, it seems like an invaluable tool to use if you are a multimedia storyteller. With the Shorthand, you can do very distinctive personalized stories with your own illustrations, animation or just great storytelling. The only problem I see is that if you can afford £120 per month tool, you might have a team that can do the code by themselves. But that might only be my "just-starting-out" point of view.