We all love stories. They are the center of lives. Whether we are telling new stories or retelling old ones, they are an integral part to our relationships. Every day we seek to create new memories that will become a part of a new story. I believe that our individual stories are part of a bigger one and that allows us to contribute to our community in a pretty cool way. 

Over the years, people still have the same fascination with stories as they always have had, however the vessel with which we choose to relate our experiences is ever changing. Technology has revolutionized the communication model. Today we can share and send each other media to inform others of what is going on. With the rise of social media, we have seen a trend of content decreasing as well as communication time. We can publish mini stories via Facebook or Instagram. We can immediately tell others a story of our current experiences. 

I think that is easy to think of story telling with a quantitative mindset. We let quality suffer because we have a drive to constantly be telling and sharing more and more. I am guilty of this. It got to the point where I had to delete a lot of the social media outlets I had because I was exhausted from attempting to share the story of my life with others online. Ironically, I was not even living it fully. I was sucked into the medium and not the content until I discovered an app that has both invigorated my creativity and refocused my storytelling efforts. 

Storehouse is an app for the iPad that was released a little over a month ago. It is a way to create short blog posts. It is very user-friendly and also visually appealing. I personally have a blog that came with my website, but it is really difficult and time-consuming to organize them and add my photos to them. The whole process of crafting a new blog post could take hours. Therefore, I sadly do not put that many out. 

Storehouse makes sharing stories so easy for anyone. It’s nothing short of a breath of fresh air. The user interface is gorgeous, simple and intuitive. All of the stories published on the app have the same structure. As in, there is a format in which Storehouse stories are displayed. There is customization up to a point. Users are only allowed up to 50 items per story. An item could either be a photo, video (up to 30 seconds) or text block. There is a universal cap that pushes users to more concisely tell their story. Also there are three options for text styles with no extra typefaces to choose from. 

Now, this seems fairly limiting, but I actually think that it is a great thing. The really awesome thing about Storehouse is that since the framework for each story has a consistent structure and is a finite, the stories are content-drive. Therefore, for anyone’s work to be different or stand out, they must put out better work. Storehouse has given everyone a good-looking story-telling vessel; now we must tell better stories. Ultimately, they will drive an output of excellent art and compelling stories. 

The app was released at a time when I was in a creative rut. I had no desire to shoot the same sorts of projects I had worked on in the past. I have the ability to tell stories from anywhere now. I can sync my SD card into my iPad and publish a story without ever touching a computer. I no longer have an excuse for not putting out more work. I now focus more of my time on the content since they took care of the rest. Storehouse rekindled a flame in my creativity to pursue new and unique projects.