The evolution of Shorthand

3D effects

Immerse your audience with new 3D effects for images in Title or Text over media sections. Add dolly, zoom, tilt, pan, or combine them as 3D effects to make your background images feel alive.

Translation

Translate your stories to over 30 languages and bring them to audiences all over the globe. We’ll auto-detect what language the story is written in, you pick the language to translate to, and a translated copy will appear for you to polish before publishing.

Shaped media

Showcase images or videos in distinctive ways with new shapes and customisable corners. Whether you're just trying something new, or complying with a major brand guideline, you can apply these effects yourself, from right within the editor.

Media Gallery carousel

Elevate your gallery with more layout flexibility. Display portrait and landscape media in a carousel instead of a grid, to give each piece a moment in the spotlight.

Play with dark and light backgrounds, choose between small, medium, and large, and switch between centre, left, or right alignment. Make your content more interactive by letting users scroll to the side to reveal more images like a slideshow.

Updated tables

Create beautiful on-brand tables with more styling options. Make tables pop in your reports, catalogues, and stories by mixing in some media.

Insert inline media, logos, images, or videos into individual cells. Highlight important information at a glance by adjusting the text style and alignment, boldness of gridlines, cell colours, and more in your table to convey key information.

Analytics emails

Stay up to date with performance. Receive a monthly email from Shorthand showing how your stories have performed month on month. If there are multiple collaborators in your workspace, each person will receive a custom analytics snapshot.

Project Search

Find exactly what you’re looking for. Now you can add a search field to the project navigation bar to search all the text content within a specific project's stories.

Expanded overlay options

Enhance your Title and Text Over Media sections by playing with blending and styling effects over media, as readers scroll through your stories. Now there are seven overlay styles, including four presets as well as opacity and colour choices that give you endless possible iterations.

Slide along the opacity scale to control how much of the images you want to blur over. Styles include top-down gradients, bottom-up gradients, left to right or vice versa, top and bottom gradients, and a full border vignette option.

Theme builder

Stay on-brand and visually cohesive with theme builder. Assign fonts, colours, and logos to your own theme and apply these across all of your Shorthand stories. Create a style guide to make collaborating and producing content easy for your team. Scale up your publishing with cohesive and engaging stories.

Published story performance enhancements

To improve efficiency, we implemented technical enhancements to ensure stories load faster and function more smoothly. The browser has less to download and background media plays at just the right time.

Title and Text Over Media scroll effects

A suite of scroll-based effects for more creative ways to capture attention and drive engagement. Effects such as zoom, fade, blur, and greyscale, can be applied singly or in combination to both the text and the background image. Mix and match, or create a signature style for your story or brand.

Video Reveal

Now you can include full-screen video in your Reveal section and ship more magic for audiences.

New standard themes

Have more fonts and colour variation at your fingers with new Shorthand standard themes. Choose from Shorthand Modern, Pastel, Sunrise, Traditional, and Urban, in addition to our previous themes.

Auto layout

Get creative with AI-powered layout suggestions. Publish at speed with AI-powered technology that builds bold visual layouts for your content.

Stumped on how to structure your story? Write, copy and paste, or import your text into the Shorthand editor and, with one click, we’ll suggest a layout with sections and titles. Don’t like it? Click again to get more options until you find a look that suits.

Import from HTML and PDF

Radically speed up your publishing workflow. Import pre-existing PDFs or paste in a URL from a publicly-accessible website, and sit back while it transforms into an immersive, responsive story. After your story is generated, you can edit and add any images, text, or other media.

Commenting

Collaborate with your team using new commenting capabilities in the editor. Add a comment and, in the sidebar, you can ask a question, suggest a change, or shower your colleagues in praise.

Tag your teammates in your comments and they’ll get a notification in their inbox. They can jump into Shorthand and respond or resolve your comment thread. Subscribe to a daily comment roundup that gets delivered to your inbox — helpful if you’re working on multiple stories.

Updated dashboard

Filter and find your work more easily in our refreshed, collaborative dashboard. The new, clean design makes it simpler to filter your stories, collections, and projects, and to manage deleted stories.

We've added a list view as an alternative to the existing card view, plus the new left-hand sidebar separates your stories from your collections and projects, and serves as the new home for your account settings.

Download analytics

Streamline your reporting workflow and analyse your metrics. Download your Shorthand Analytics data as a CSV file. You’ll be able to see how many people have viewed stories, the percentages for mobile or desktop, the number of readers that scrolled to the last section of the story, and the average time readers had the story open in an active browser tab.

Project templates

Kick-start your content creation and publish at speed with a selection of stunning project templates. Our template library has expanded with a suite of beautiful, new multi-page templates designed for content like magazines, catalogues, and guides. Select templates when creating a new project, and edit or tweak to your heart's desire.

Media library

Find and reuse images from your stories and access thousands of free images from Unsplash. Click 'edit media' in the editor to access your media library when adding or changing images.

By default, you’ll see all the images from the current story which can be re-used in other locations of your story. Captions and alt-text applied to the image previously will be copied to the new location in your story, though these can easily be changed or deleted.

Split and convert sections

Seamlessly split or transform your sections. With just one click you can break up large chunks of text and blocks into two sections. Or you can convert one section type into another — we’ll move the contents so you can save time and simply swap your section design.

Password-protected publishing

Collaborate with care with password-protected publishing. Closely control who can see your stories by curating tiered access and visibility options in Shorthand. With password protection, collaborators will be sent a unique link and One-Time Password to access published content. Add and remove people at any time.

Video transcoding

Upload your videos and feel confident that Shorthand will optimise them for readers. Now Shorthand will transcode all uploaded videos under 10 minutes with a recognisable video MIME type into the appropriate format that best balances performance and quality.

More Reveal speed options

Control transition speeds in Reveal sections to show content as quickly or slowly as you’d like.

Image filters and enhancements

Give your story a consistent look and feel by applying a hue or colour effect across all the images. Image filters can help evoke a particular mood, tone, or brand identity across your work.

Apply the image effects directly in Shorthand without messing around with Photoshop or another third-party tool. When editing your media, apply one of our preset filters, select your own custom hue from the colour picker, or upload a reference image that generates a filter.

Adjustable text column widths

Change layouts to best suit your text and images with adjustable text columns. Adjust text blocks to be wider or narrower by dragging the outside line of a text block to the left or right — available in Text, Scrollmation, and Background Scrollmation sections.

Rich embeds

Add engaging and dynamic content to your story. Embed within your story by simply pasting in the URL of the object: social media posts, maps, charts, video and audio players, quizzes, forms, Wikipedia article summaries, and more.

This can be content you have specifically created for your story and are hosting on other platforms, or other items that are publicly accessible.

Resize text in all text sections

We improved the UI so that text sizes appear more consistently across sections within a story for a harmonious look and feel.

Change button text colour

Customise buttons with greater control to optimise for clicks, accessibility, and adherence to brand styles. Now on top of changing button colours, you can change the colour of text within.

Anyone with a link publishing visibility

Share your story with the whole world or a select few. When publishing to Shorthand hosting, you can publish stories as 'public' or 'anyone with a link can view'.

Story resource links

Keep track of resources you’ve used over the lifecycle of your stories, and easily share them with your story collaborators. Create and edit an individual list of resources for any story.

These may be documents that contain your story outline or draft, planning tools, other stories used for inspiration, image lightboxes, communication channels, social media tracking, etc. These links are easily accessible from the story cards on your Shorthand dashboard, and from directly within the Shorthand editor.

Social image generator

Promote your content in style. Instantly generate social-media-ready images based on your story title section. Simply click ‘Promote’ from your dashboard or story editor, edit your text to suit, toggle to choose from a variety of social platforms, and then download your image to share with your social networks.

Copy stories between teams

Collaborate and share with ease by copying stories from one team to another in a workspace. Now you can share similar story templates between workspaces, tweak stories between countries, locations, or teams, and allow for different publishing configurations.

Shorthand analytics

Engagement is a top priority for impactful storytelling; enter Shorthand Analytics. When enabled, your dashboard can show you story view counts, percentage of views on desktop or mobile devices, percentage completion, and average time on story for a given date range.

You can combine this data with complementary analytics services to identify what resonates with readers and amplify your impact.

Unsplash integration

An extraordinary photo library, with more than three million free, high-resolution images, at your fingertips. Add unlimited media to your stories from inside the Shorthand app.

With this integration, you’ll see the Unsplash option every time you go to upload media to your story. And Unsplash's license means you can copy, modify, and repurpose images for commercial purposes, free of charge.

Google sign-in support

Streamline your access to Shorthand and reduce your reliance on multiple passwords by using your existing Google account credentials. Gmail and Google Workspace users can sign up and sign in using Google SSO authentication.

Full-width block quotes

Present testimonials, highlights, or a direct quotation with full-width block quotes in Shorthand. Additionally, more size, insert, and text options are available in your Title and Text Over Media sections.

Bulk story operations

Streamline your workflow by being able to copy, delete, republish, or unpublish stories in bulk.

Tables

Present information in your story in a concisely formatted table. Click on the table icon in the insert bar that appears at the start and end of each text block or paste in tables from other sources such as Google Docs, Google Sheets, Word, Excel, Pages and Numbers.

Projects (beta)

Create and publish multi-story content faster than ever. Shorthand Projects are an easy way to organise multiple Shorthand stories into a website, mini-site, multi-page story, magazine, digital edition, or content hub.

Add your Shorthand stories to a new Project, build out your menu structure with our drag-and-drop tool, and then publish to your destination of choice. All stories in a Project share a common theme, publishing destination, and navigation structure — just like a website.

Copy section

Duplicate any section of your story to wherever you want in seconds. This new copy functionality enables you to copy any section of a story to your current story or add to a personal clipboard of copied section templates.

Then you can insert the copied section from the saved sections panel and edit it just as you would any other section. Copied sections inherit the theme of the story into which they are inserted.

Grid section

Create flexible web layouts for a range of content types — including web pages, proposals, and content hubs — all from within Shorthand.

Grids can be customised by anyone on your team directly in the Shorthand editor, with no skills in web design or code required. You can easily add new rows and cells, import images, change fonts, and apply colours.

Concurrent editing

Collaborate in real-time with concurrent editing. Let multiple users work on the same story. Highlighted user avatars in the header indicate who else is viewing at that moment.

3D images

Make your visual stories even more engaging by creating 3D effects from your static images, directly in Shorthand. Apply 3D motion to your 2D images to give your reader an immersive experience. You can embed text within the ‘layers’ of an image to create powerful title and header sections.

Story tags

Organise and find stories in your workspace easily with tags. Create, add, or delete tags to group your work by theme, project, or however you like. Each story card has a 'Tags' menu that is accessible when you hover over the story.

SOC 2 Type 2

Shorthand is SOC 2 compliant. SOC 2 certification is based on the AICPA's Trust Services Criteria and involves rigorous audits by certified firms to ensure that data controls are properly designed and operating effectively.

Shorthand undergoes regular SOC 2 audits to ensure our products and services are enterprise-ready and meet customers' expectations of robust data protection and compliance.

ISO 27001

Shorthand is ISO 27001 certified to protect your data with internationally recognised security standards. This ensures secure management of assets like customer details, financial data, and intellectual property through processes that assess risks, implement strong security controls, and embed information security across all operations.

Scrollpoints

Take your audience on an immersive journey with no-code interactive storytelling. Upload an image, such as a map, photo, or illustration, choose parts of it to highlight, and then optionally annotate the highlights with text.

As the reader scrolls through your Scrollpoints section, your Shorthand story will automatically pan and zoom into each point in turn. Use this engaging new section type to create animated maps, timelines, educational content, and more.

Annotations and footnotes

Add context to your story with annotations and footnotes. Attach explanatory text to words or phrases in your story. When readers mouse over or tap on highlighted words, a bubble containing text will pop up. You can also link and refer to footnotes at the bottom of your story.

SSO for previews

Apply extra security by requiring SSO authentication to view story previews.

Media Gallery

Unlock more flexibility in how you integrate media into stories and display it to engage readers. Embed multiple images and videos into a single grid, and then re-size, rearrange, or reformat to your liking.

Galleries can help break up the flow of a long narrative, or be used as a story centrepiece. Readers can choose to view the media as a group or browse them individually in a slideshow using a lightbox.

Text over Reveal

Supercharge the Reveal section with text blocks. Perfect for simultaneously describing and highlighting segments of narrative that correspond directly with individual images.

Big, bold, lengthy, and colourful, or short and discreet — text colour, size, and style can be independently set for each box. Rather than uploading images with embedded graphical elements, Text over Reveal is SEO and screen-reader-friendly, responsive, and easy to edit.

SAML-based Single Sign-On

Improve security and streamline the user experience with SAML-based Single Sign-On (SSO). Log in once and access multiple applications seamlessly. Organisations can now scale with Shorthand while maintaining regulatory compliance, minimising security risks, and lowering IT support costs.