I thought it’d be good to try writing out the iPad Journal segments as blog posts so that I can plan things out in pieces. So I’ll just start them as text blog posts with some drawings. My current outline…
Things I did with my iPad in March
- Made short animations for my blog (That’s what this post is)
- Switched it up from the 2018 11” to the 2020 12.9″
- Used it while on the treadmill (the quarantine emergency purchase): the iPad/iPhone writing while walking combo
- Made a GoodNotes template in Figma (desktop browser support + mouse support)
- Wrote on the treadmill… on the couch.. in portrait mode (different accessories – MX Master 3, vertical stand)…
Bonus: when all else failed…
- … used it to hold the phone while playing Starcraft
Oh yeah the animations
- I’ve been using Procreate—Can’t overstate how much of a value Procreate is. Plenty of drawing apps but I keep coming back to it and now that it’s so popular there are just so many more videos of people showing how to do things on it than there are for the other apps.
- You can set a background layer and a foreground layer—I think this is something new with the latest version of Procreate. I used to go through a pretty tedious process making copies of notecards under each frame and merging them.
- Two animations for the price of one—When you make the frame by frame animation you also still have the time-lapse animation. Also worth noting that you always get the timelapse animation. Which is why I draw in Procreate primarily. There’s always time-lapses I can pull from when I need an animation. And I don’t need to remember to turn it on before drawing or anything like that.
- I set the radial menu up for animation—Actually it’s pretty much just one change. I add “Duplicate layer” so that I can make the next frame quickly without needing to tap on it in the timeline. It’s a small change but it offloads cognitive load each time I look at the frame time bar and try to think about which one is the current one and try to tap the (relatively) tiny rectangle.
That’s that. Here’s an animation I made with the older Procreate where I added individual frames as background frames.
And this is one I made when I thought that drawing on photos I took was going to be like, the thing that I was going to do with my free time. I forget exactly why I got away from that. But now that I’m on day 13 of not leaving the apartment, it’s starting to seem like a good thing to pick back up.
The plan now is that I’ll write 4 more of these posts and each of them will be turned into a one minute video segment that I compile into a 5-7 minute iPad Journal video.