Lessons Learned

An Illustrated Story

This article is part of the Drawing Room section. If you’d like information about how to manage your reading experience on Written Ward, you can find that here.

Formatting Wishes

I have always envied the formatting capabilities Medium offers to its users. While no longer as revolutionary today as when Medium debuted, in those early days it presented a beautifully designed reading experience. Substack offers many of the same formatting features, but I would love to see them innovate and push web styling (both on-site and in-app) to offer a more magazine-like feel.

I am not a designer. As much as possible, I leave that work to professionals like

Nathaniel Roy

and others who possess those specialized skill sets. What follows is likely not an exemplar of good design, but it does showcase the types of features I would love to see Substack adopt. Specifically, text wrapping around images. In a perfect world, we’d also get drop caps, but we’ll fight that battle another day.

Below, you’ll find an eight page story that combines text and images. It’s not a new idea. Newspapers, books, and magazines have been doing this for over a thousand years. Other websites already do this now, but it’s my sincere wish that Substack would offer the ability to format things in this way because I believe it would really make all of our newsletters stand out as both beautiful and professional.

What I’ve done has been a very manual process involving creating images first in watercolor, then altering or finishing them digitally, then importing them into a layout application that could handle text flow. It was much more labor intensive than I thought it would be and maybe that’s a good argument for why this shouldn’t be done, but I do have faith in the engineers at Substack that they could figure out an easier way to make this work. My big problem was that I was drawing and painting everything. It wouldn’t have been nearly as involved if I had been using stock photography. Regardless, I hope you enjoy the piece and that you’ll join with me in hoping that some form of these features make their way here eventually.

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Lessons Learned

This was designed to be read on a smart phone in the app. You can still read it on a desktop computer, but the best experience is to click on the first image from within the app and then swipe through the remaining pages.

What’s Next?

This week, I’ll be doing some livestreams devoted to exploring some topics that interest me and that I hope will interest you as well. If you can’t make the live conversation, I’ll be sharing the recordings at a later date.

Also, I look forward to getting back to publishing new fiction. I’ll be introducing you to one of my favorite characters who will take on an increasingly important role in the stories to come. She’s old, feisty, and opinionated. I think you’ll like her.