Half a year ago one user called our attention to a gallery made with Adobe Spark. Besides the stunning photos, the page design was also modern and sexy. It went beyond the confines of a traditional web album, with lengthy texts between photos and stylish animations. This type of use has escaped our attention so far, although many of our users would have appreciated it, I take. This is how Story skin was born.
You can simply drop a handful of photos onto Story – they will look decent –, still, this skin excels in its ability to create crafted text-heavy stories. Not only the text, but the presentation of the thumbnails is unique. They come in 3 flavors making the layout much more exciting. Check out below!
Beyond the new look, Story skin has received all the bells and whistles of Tiger or Photoblogger skins; the search, shopping cart, feedback, background music, and Google maps to name a few.
The opening view is a full-screen “hero” image, which you can overlay with a semi-transparent color. If you press “Enter” the page scrolls down.
The control buttons are fixed to the top left corner so all the functions remain visible.
This page starts with a custom section. You can add one by New page → Custom.htt. Add “Title” for the headline, and add content through the “Comment” field.
The images can be displayed in 3 different modes: as thumbnails, as single images and as full-width images. The skin automatically sorts them out by their aspect ratio.
The widest images are treated as full-width, and the images with an aspect ratio less than 3:2 as thumbnails. The rest in between are treated as single (column-width) images. To control these thresholds visit the Story → Design → Images panel.
If you want to override this automatic treatment for a specific image go to Edit mode → Image data → Treat image as.
These full-width images might act as chapter separators. Their title is set in larger font so they stand out.
Blocks of thumbnails in masonry layout look the best if you supply the skin with images of variable orientation/aspect ratio. It pays playing with their order too for the best look.
Folders can be inserted at any place in this skin. The larger thumbnail on the left is the image selected as “Folder thumbnail”, the other 3 are randomly picked from the folder on every “Make”.
The folders have an alternative background color here, which can also be used for custom sections, thumbnails or simply in an alternating manner.
This skin is also novel in the way it handles custom pages. You can leave them as separate pages – just like before –, but in Story you can embed them into the index page too. This results in a single-page layout, which saves visitors from unnecessary navigation.
Here you can play with this album:
Tell your story
I hope you will love this skin as much as I enjoyed developing it. Comments are welcome in the Story skin forum.
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