One of the things that I love about the online, social media part of Interactive Storytelling is that as a storytelling you can just dive right in and start telling your story. As writers and creative producers we hide behind the obstacles of waiting on others, like publishers and broadcasters to green light us and cover the scarily large costs associated with building tv series and movies or publishing a book. In this space and with open source software it removes many of those obstacles, evening out the playing field for artists, and for talent to shine through. Don’t get me wrong though, it is still a hard road to walk – it takes time, perseverance and creativity on how to use the tools your given.
Recently, when we at Ahimsa Media, were producing the Reading is Sexy Calendar for Emme Rogers, I decided to see if I could design the calendar’s layout myself as I had a very clear vision of what I wanted. As I was working off of a linux system, InDesign or Quark weren’t really options, so I did a bit of research and found Scribus. Stefan sent me this great tutorial to follow and off I went. Well, thanks in part to the tutorial, I found it relatively easy to figure out and have been thrilled with the quality of the product that we were able to create in Scribus. Scribus is one of these amazing examples of open source software that I mentioned above, that evens out the playing field for artists. The Calendar looks fantastic! My one piece of advice to you, is to ignore their calendar template and design your own from scratch – the results are worth it.
Thanks Scribus! And thank you Stefan!
Filed under: Bridging Media, Feedback, Resources, Technology Tagged: | #readingissexy, Ahimsa Media, Being Emme, calendar, desktop publishing, desktop publishing software, Emme Rogers, interactive storytelling, layout, linux, reading is sexy, scribus, ubuntu
