Shorthand Reviews

Shorthand is an easy to learn, powerful web service allowing you to create compelling "scrollytelling" narratives without having to use expensive web design software or learn complex Javascript/React/Node.js code. In fact, you don't need any coding experience at all to use Shorthand, and yet it offers a wide variety of ways to customize your user experience, so that it won't seem like you're churning out the kind of cookie-cutter, template-ified output you often see from no-code solutions.

If you'd like to see the sort of combination business case study/historical essay/cultural analysis I put together for my personal portfolio using Shorthand, I think I managed to push the platform pretty hard and demonstrate a lot of the different usage options in my Shorthand story:

https://koreanfood.shorthandstories.com/casestudy/

If you've ever put together a particularly fancy Powerpoint/Google Slides slideshow, you can probably get started on making a good Shorthand story. When you sign up for Shorthand and click "New Story," you can start from scratch, or select from a story template. You can only have one story published for free, but there's no limit on the number of unpublished stories you can have in your account AFAIK, so I highly suggest you add the first dozen or so templates to your account and then, ideally with a dual monitor setup, go through each story within the editor, and from the preview of what it would look like to an end user. This, IMO, is the best way to learn how to use Shorthand - it only took me about 4 hours to go from never having used the system before to having a pretty good handle on it using this method.

Here's my ideal workflow - I wish I'd known this before I started using Shorthand, but now you'll have the benefit of my mistakes!

Okay, so here's the workflow I highly suggest you use:

First, using your image editor of choice (I used Canva Pro, but Photoshop would be as good or better), create the following blank editable project/design files with a solid color background of #222222 (the shade of black used for Shorthand's dark mode) or white (for light mode). Create four projects of the following sizes:

4096 x 2160 for Scrollpoints sections

25610 x 1440 for Reveal sectinons

1080 x 1920 for Mobile

Secondly, enable the guidelines to show the "safe" viewable area for each image. (On Canva Pro, this is "File -> View Settings -> Show Margins)

Finally, add images and text as necessary WHOLLY within the safe margins of the appropriate sized project file, then save the output as a .JPG for uploading to shorthand.

Doing it this way will make it easy to adapt your elements of your shorthand story for mobile, and guarantees it will look right, with text and images synced properly, across any browser or device. I wish I'd done it this way from the beginning, and in the future, this is definitely the workflow I'm going to follow. If you follow these steps, implementing a great-looking Shorthand story will be very easy, and anyone with basic design experience will be able to do it. If I had a design background, this probably would have been obvious, but coming from a coding/Python background, it took me a while to figure this out. Overall, though, I'd say ease of implementation is good.

That said, it is easy to make mistakes in designing your Shorthand story that will be a pain to correct later - I should know, as I made just about all of them. So let me give you the heads up here so you don't make the same mistake I do.

First, I should have realized it when adding a new "Text" section was NOT in the same category as "Synced Media", but while text sections can have up to 3 columns, ***these columns will not necessarily appear sycned with each other on your users' device or browser***, and in addition, on mobile, the text sections will display each column one after the other - so all of column one from beginning to end, then all of column two, then all of column three, for example. If you try, as I was trying to do, to split text and images across two columns intending them to scroll down the screen together, this will NOT WORK. So don't try it.

Instead, here's what I recommend: while Shorthand offers a variety of different "section" styles to use, I pretty much only recommend you use three - "Reveal" (light or dark), "Text Over Media", and "Scrollpoints" (particularly scrollpoints static). In my story I linked to, those are the only 3 I ended up using IIRC.

I'll explain my ideal workflow at the end of the my "Pro" section, but one more thing:

A story designed to look good on a desktop/PC screen will NOT necessarily look good on Mobile right away. "Scrollpoints" sections actually translate to mobile pretty much on their own, but "Reveal" sections do not. Once you know what you're doing, it's easy to adapt your story for mobile, but you will probably need to implement those adapations manually. So, ease of integration is easy if you're thinking ahead, but difficult if you're not. Kind of the same as any system.

The customer support was great - I had some problems with my Shorthand story (because of overuse of unoptimized image files), and Shorthand got back to me right away with suggested next steps that actually worked.

Shorthand is the easiest way to create a compelling, browser-agnostic, desktop and mobile friendly, media rich, interactive story that benefits from the "scrollytelling" framework to drive end user engagement. If it could implement some of the more advanced data visualization methods available in MatPlotLib, such as customizable hoverpoints when you scroll over specific points on a scatterplot or timeline, it would honestly have everything you could need to make a compelling data visualization story; as it is, you can simulate those effects using Scrollpoints at the cost of a little extra work.

I wanted to create an interesting, visually compelling digital narrative piece to demonstrate my chops for a personal portfolio I'm creating, and I think Shorthand did a great job allowing me to acheive that goal.

Reveal section and text over media section, customer support

The tool of font size controling and line spaces

Help me to visualizing the analytical articles

The accessibility - it is not overly complicated, it is very easy to use and offers a lot of great features. Some web-publishing platforms are overly complex and are time-consuming, but Shorthand makes every aspect so much easier.

Not a whole lot, just small things. Some of the features are great but not as edit-able as I'd like - for example, the header is not movable when creating a story. If you end up creating something later that you'd like to move to the top, it won't let you. I'd also like to see a more improved analytics side as time progresses - I like seeing each stories view counts and data, but you can only get it when you click on the analytics for each specific story. An analytics dashboard that shows all of the data in one place would be extremely helpful.

Content creation was a more complex issue before Shorthand - it had to go through our web department who had more knowledge of the platform our website used. Now, it's easier for our content cream to create the articles themselves instead of having to go through our Web department.

Easy to use, no coding required

Pages always look great on any screen

Very simple to adapt for mobile

Allows you to focus on your story instead of wasting your time on tools that are hard to use

Not for people who want to move a button 1 pixel to the right

Shorthand enables me to rapidly create functional web pages, all the while having confidence in their seamless performance across various screen dimensions.

It was a great platform for creating high design presentation material for our C-Suite stakeholders to take them on a case study journey. The interface was super intuitive.

I'd say, I wish there were more options of page styles and even more functionality...mostly because more just means we can use this in a multitude of ways. But it definitely outperforms several other methods, as-is.

The design and fluidity that it is capable of, is really allowing it to shine over other platforms.

I love how it allows you to easily create impactful stories in no time

I would like it to have a wider variety of templates.

Impactful storytelling in journalism

Shorthand is great and makes it super easy to make very impressive looking stories that really come to life and engage audiences. It is really easy to use and the consistent additions and new developments means we can always keep our content fresh. The team at Shorthand are also very helpful and are incredibly quick to respond if there are any issues.

There isn't much to dislike about Shorthand, and will be great to see the platform continue to develop more and more new features.

Making it much easier and much quicker to create impressive looking content for our website. It is also working well to engage audiences and keep them on the page for longer.

The easy-to-use section templates and tools like "Projects" make creating stories fun.

As a graphic designer, I want to create more complex designs, and we are sometimes limited if there are more flexible options to create more complex layouts without using codes.

Shorthand makes presentations come to life instead of using boring PowerPoint to present data/information. Keeps viewers interested and engaged with the content.

The ability to tell stories in an engaging and different way allows us to showcase our stories, photos and videos to our audience on web in a way we haven't been able to before. We are super excited to test shorthand and explore what is possible with the tool. On top of that, the shorthand team are brilliant. They are responsive and keen to help. We are new to shorthand and our success manager Morgan has provided great feedback on our stories to improve them and has provided brilliant support to our team. She has been responsive, helpful, and has either been able to answer all our questions or provide solutions.

As we get familiar with the tool it can take quite a lot of time to build out our stories. The only other note is that the product is quite expensive.

Previously we have only had basic blog and news templates to display our content on our website and have not been able to showcase photo stories or content or produce long-form content in a way that is engaging to our audiences. Shorthand is a great solution to that problem for us.

Shorthand is an excellent tool, that me and my team couldn't be without. It's intuitive, creative and visually appealing, and the support behind the scenes is also excellent.

Nothing! I've had no problems with Shorthand so far.

With Shorthand, my team and I can tell stories in a visually appealing and engaging way. When we build something using Shorthand, we always receive excellent feedback.