Creative thinking
Whether you want to improve your skills with photography, video, music or drawing, Apple’s new guides have got you covered
APPLE is nothing if not inventive about the way it tries to encourage people to buy and use its products. After all, who else would produce an extensive creative curriculum outlining in detail how to make videos, take great photos, learn to draw, and even make music?
Yes, the Everyone Can Create project is as inventive as it hopes to encourage you to be… using an iPad, of course.
Four books covering these four subjects are available on Apple Books, and they are not halfhearted attempts at instruction manuals… they are beautifully designed and thoughtfully constructed, useful and comprehensive, and if you own an iPad of any kind, they are essential downloads that will extend your skills, make you more productive, and just help you have more fun making stuff with your iPad. All of them are free, too.
As if you needed any more convincing that Apple means business here, there’s even a Teacher Guide, which hopes to help teachers use these manuals for creativity in the classroom.
While they might be aimed at young people, everyone can get something out of these guides – that’s why it’s called Everyone Can Create, I suppose.
PHOTO
NOW that everyone’s a photographer, guidance on photography is perhaps the one we’re in the most urgent need of.
The Photos book is about as comprehensive a starter-kit anyone could ask for.
Using Apple’s own apps like Camera, Photos, Keynote, and Pages, to work through a variety of projects – from making a “portrait from the past” to help on how to tell LOTS of people like to take written notes, lots of people like to make sketch-based notes and lots of people like to take audio notes.
This app does all three of those things, so if nothing else, will allow you to shave a couple of icons off your home screen.
Of course, it is about much more than that – it’s about having lots of options with which to capture your own ideas as you have them, and those of others at talks, tutorials and lectures. If I’d had Noted when I was a student, I might have got a better degree.
It’s organised very simply with a list of notebooks, to which you can add notes which can feature audio recordings, text, images, a story in a single photo, from making a collage to building an online portfolio of your own images – there’s a lot of wise guidance to give you a good grounding in the basics of how to create good images.
DRAWING THE Apple Pencil might just be the best thing Apple has made in recent years. Team it with an iPad and a host of great apps and you have a creative powerhouse.
The Drawing guide will show you how to draw a portrait and a landscape, a still life, a logo, and even an infographic.
It’ll even tell you how to make a book of your artwork. Apple’s own apps are to the fore, but you’ll be shown the ropes on the Tayasui Sketches School app as well.
MUSIC
MUSIC is one of those art forms that a lot of people think they just and drawings (Apple Pencil is supported).
Every entry is time-tagged to the audio recording, so as you make text notes while recording a talk, you can easily find the section of audio the text note relates to. You can even manually time-tag sections of can’t do. But don’t try telling Justin Timberlake that – he features in a video in this book that tries to inspire even the least musically gifted to at least have a go.
As the man himself says, all you need is one note, and you take it from there.
The Music book gives you the lowdown on Apple’s own Garageband app, and will help you build a number of song projects, including an instrumental, an original rap and an original song. your audio notes if you want to mark them as a key moment.
There is excellent noise reduction for premium subscribers, who can also make unlimited notes (free accounts are limited to five), and export notes as PDFs.
As if all that wasn’t enough,
There’s a lot of valuable – and occasionally quite complex – music information… but you don’t have to be Mozart (or even play an instrument) to have a little fun.
VIDEO OF ALL the skills on show here, being able to put together a decent video is perhaps the most valuable in the digital world of today.
If you want to go beyond the basics, this guide will help – it’ll show you how to storyboard, explain basic shooting and editing, storytelling, and even how to set up to cover a live event.
Don’t go on IGTV without reading this first.
To access the guides, download Apple Books from the App Store on your device and search for “Everyone Can Create”. All the guides are free. there are both Apple Watch (for quick on-the-go recording) and Mac apps that sync with the iOS version, and auto transcription of recorded notes is in the works.
Subscribers pay £9.99 for a whole year of the premium tier, or 99p month.