Visual Story Telling is a must-have quality for a communication designer. Forget designers— pretty much anyone will benefit from having a solid foundation in telling a story visually. Conveying a message with a powerful visual will make the message have a bigger impact on the viewer and will resonate with them for a longer period.
Visuals speak louder than Words.
How to master Visual Story Telling! Lets take a deeper look into this.
Understand the Message: This is a no-brainer. If you want to communicate a message to a crowd, the first thing that you must have is proper understanding of the message. What are you trying to say, why are you saying it and to whom are you communicating this to. To make things clear, lets use an example. The message that you have to convey is “Save the trees”. As a visual story teller, you need to start with What do you mean by save the trees? Why do you want to save them? Who are you talking to?
What is your narrative: Now to tell any story, you need to structure it so that its easy to relate to. Perspectives matters! In whose perspective/ angle are you going to narrate this story. Lets consider our previous example again. Save the trees - who are being affected by it? Us, the animals, climate or even the planet. A good tool to figure out the best narrative is to mind map and plot every thought that comes to your mind. Take a look at this picture here.
In this mind map, you can see the potential stories that you can use to convey the message from different perspectives. For inst: You can show humans sharing their homes with animals as they don’t have a home of their own anymore. Here its the human perspective. There is another thread where we can see a concrete planet — where the story is told from earth’s perspective.
3. What is your visual style? Now that you have your narrative clear, the next step would be to identify a visual style to show your message. Are you going to convey this using abstract visuals, actual photographs, photo manipulations, minimalist shapes or illustrations (to mention a few). Your knowledge on visual design styles, is really crucial here. Mood boarding with any design repositories would be a really good exercise to increase your exposure and enhance your knowledge on various design styles and trends. Choose a style that goes along with your message, enhances your aesthetic appeal and connects with people.
We will come back to our example here again, I am trying to visualize the same message with two narratives using two different design styles.
Message: Save our Trees
Narrative: From Human Perspective.
Design Style: Surrealism
Message: Save our Trees
Narrative: From Planet's Perspective.
Design Style: Collage
