We’ve used this app a couple of different ways. I showed it to Sal, thinking we could make comic strips, but we got distracted by the joy of putting moustaches on the photos of him. Really. It was kind of addicting. Spiders were a fun way of touching up some of his less “happy” photos too.
It evolved nicely into our way of sending Thank You notes after Christmas. We’d take a photo of Sal enjoying the gift, then import that into the Strip Design app, slap a moustache on Sal, and then put a thought bubble coming out of his head, where he’d write his Thank you thoughts about the gift. Then we’d email it off to the gift giver. I thought they were fun, creative ways to say thank you and we haven’t heard any complaints from the recipients. When Valentines day came around, we saw that others would take photos and attach candies to them as a way of making a personalized card. So we did the same thing with some chocolates…and a thought bubble popping out of his head saying “Happy Valentine’s Day”…and of course, he had a rocking moustache.
But, you can also take drawings you’ve made in Drawing Pad (or any other app that will save to the photo album), and scale them and put them into multi-panel pages and add comic book text to the images to create your own story too. Because the app is so powerful, the interface isn’t very kid friendly for these more complicated projects, but if you’re looking for a great, creative joint project to work on together, this a wonderful tool for that. Just let them steer and direct you and you can help work through the UI to get the right photos into the right panels.
There are tons of layouts for the images, probably enough to be overwhelming. The text auto-resizes. There are lots of stickers you can add to the photos (including moustaches – did I mention that?). And a variety of thought bubbles that can be added and customized for your story’s needs.
It’s a universal app that will run on your iPhone or iPad. Though it’s much easier to collaborate on the iPad.
Cost: $2.99
iPhone/iPod
iPad
