App for journalists: Legend, for animating text

What is it? An app that lets you animate text, using pictures or videos as background

Devices: iOS, Android

Cost: £1.48 on iTunes, £1.52 on Google Play Store

How is it of use to journalists? Twitter gives you 140 characters for text, but that's including any links, pictures of videos you want to share.

It can be a struggle to include all of them and as people are more likely to engage with a tweet if it contains a visual element, you might have to compromise.

In the past, we've recommended apps like OneShot and Textshot+ to make quotes stand out, but Legend combines everything in one place.

If you want to share a quote from an article you wrote, Legend lets you animate text or alternatively, overlay it with a background picture or video footage and create a six-second GIF.

How it works


Screenshots from the Legend app, with the finished result below

Legend is quick and easy to use and you can craft your GIF in three simple steps.

First, open the app and type in your desired text. As the limit is 100 characters, you might have to stick to shorter quotes or try animating a headline instead.

The second step is adding a background, either by taking a picture, choosing from the images and videos on your phone or browsing Flickr within the app.

Legend then gives you 18 pre-set animation options to select from, displaying a preview of each one. After choosing the one that best suits your text, you can change the colour of the font and you should be able to export the GIF straight to Instagram or WhatsApp.

However, it's worth noting that our attempts to share the GIF to Twitter and Instagram directly from the app were unsuccessful, although text message and e-mail worked fine.

This is because Twitter does not support GIFs over 500kb, so the best option is saving the final product on your device as a video before sharing on social media.

Uploading a six-second GIF or video from Legend to Twitter only takes up 23 characters, so that still gives you plenty of room to add more text and a link to an article, if you wish to.

Meet Voyager: To help journalists find and illustrate stories with data http://t.co/S5KSp4LQrq pic.twitter.com/TU1Fs7Syjo

— Mădălina Ciobanu (@madalinacrc) August 12, 2015

Update: We have updated the article to reflect that the option to export GIFs from Legend directly to Twitter and Instagram does not function because Twitter has a 500kb limit on GIFs.

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