QUARANTINE SPECIALS

Hotglue.me is probably your best content making friend in these low resource isolated times.







Hotglue is a free cut/paste style web developing tool. It requires no prior knowledge of website building/coding and despite it's slightly clunky interface it's easy to use. It operates straight out of your browser, so there is no need to download/install anything all you need to do is make an account.
It's free to use up to a certain amount of storage (and if you want more (web)space it only cost £12 every 6 months).

It works the same as a basic image editor, where you click on stuff to move it around, you left click the mouse once (on the webpage) to bring up a menu that lets you add text and images, and double click to bring up a second menu that lets you add new pages, change the background, change the page name etc.

There is a more in depth how to on the hotglue website (linked above/shown below).

Some ideas for distributing and publishing you work whilst in lock-down. As the rest of the stuff covered in this site is mainly physical, this section will focus on mainly digital making and distributing.

As we are currently all confined to our houses/flats almost all sharing/distributiong of creative work has moved online, mainly to blogs instagram and other social medi, which can often be quite limiting in how they let you display stuff. Here are a few alternatives/ways to make conventianal means of content sharing more exiting.

Giphy Is another useful free piece of internet software/kit. Giphy is the 3rd party platform that Facebook/Instagram and other social media sites source all their .gif content from.

By creating and account and then getting it registered you can then upload .gif files to the platform that can then be accessed through social media (for Instagram stories etc).

Social media isn't always the best/healthiest way of promoting and sharing your work but given the current circumstances (and how much everyone is glued to it as a result) it has become the main/the only way people can communicate. Giphy is a good way of embellishing/ improving the work you are sharing on Instagram etc. And is also a good incentive to start making short animations/ moving graphics. (there is a section about making .gif's below this).

HOW TO GET YOUR WORK ONTO GIPHY AND THEN ONTO 
INSTA/SOCIALS

To be able to upload .gif's to giphy you just need an account.
But o make your .gif's available on Instagram stories etc. you need to get your account verified.

Getting your account verified is actually pretty easy. All you need to do is make sure you have uploaded at least 5 .gif's and fill out a short form.
The form is available on the giphy support page, >>

https://support.giphy.com/hc/en-us/articles/360020231651-Verified-on-GIPHY

The form is super short and to create an artist account all you really need is an email adress a name, an instagram and a website.


It will take a day or to to get approved but once it's done your .gif's will start to appear in .gif searches in apps/social media.

TOP TIPS
> different kinds of .gif's appear in different .gif searches. If you want to be able to use your .gif as a sticker in Instagram stories you need to make the background transparent, if you want it t appear in messenger or whatsapp .gif searches it needs to have no transparency.
>when uploading your gif there will be an option to add tags, what you tag the .gif is what you will have to search to find it in instagram etc.
>you can also use giphy to make backgrounds for zoom meetings/calls (i think)
>.gif's can take a few hours - a day to appear in instagram sticker searches and the like, so don't worry if it doesn't show up straight away.

if you don't have a website just make a really quick one on hotglue !!

HAPPY GIF'ING !!!

As well as the basic interface you can also add custom code to hotglue sites (via this icon in the double click menu>>).

This is more complicated and requires at least some knowledge of web coding but is a fun thing to try out if you have time.
this site below contains a couple of useful how to's for this kind of thing:
https://danja.hotglue.me/

Hotglue is good for making simple text/image based websites (like this one) but has a wide range of applications and gives you much more control than most free/cheap web dev platforms, so can be used for all kinds of purposes.

It is super useful if you just want to present some content or some images in a web format without it being surrounded by a blog/app interface. Can be used for portfolio/information sites as well as a way of displaying comics/animations and video's (youtube and vimeo can be linked to it).

HOT GLUE TIPS
> Because hotglue edits the webpage in real time sometimes changes like uploading a new background will take some time to appear (this is because your browser is still using an older version of the webpage to save space) just refresh the page a few times or open it in incognito mode and the changes should take effect.

REMEMBER .gif,s aren't just useful for social media.
They are a good way of embellishing/improving your digital work. For instance; if you are worried about your zine not being as interesting as you have to distribute it digitally due to the nationwide lock-down, add in some animated content/animate the original content to make it more exiting. That screenshot from the film you were going to use in it can now be a short clip from the film instead etc.. etc..
even just tiny animations like heads/eyes slightly moving or wind blowing can make comics and illustrations more involving and exiting when viewed on screen.

That's all well and good, but how are you going to make these .gif's Giphy does have its own inbuilt .gif maker, but it tends to not be that useful, your much better off making them yourself. Photoshop is probably one of the easier ways of doing so, but most other animating software will have options to export as .gif's