What Is Visual Storytelling?

If you hadn’t guessed, Visual Storytelling is kind of our thing. This blog and another next week will look over what Visual Storytelling is and How To Use it.

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What Is Visual Storytelling?

Stories are one of the oldest ways mankind has entertained ourselves, throughout our History. We told Stories to laugh and to teach our Children what is and isn’t safe to do.

Eventually Oral Stories gave way to the Greek Plays and the written word. But not everyone could read. Not everyone, even to this day, speaks the same language. 

Simply put if you were stuck on a Mountain Side with rescue hours away you may want to build a fire but no one around you speaks English. Now you could bash sticks together and mime a fire or perhaps, draw a picture of a Fire in the Snow.

Obviously that example is a bit drastic but it perfectly showcases the base of Visual Storytelling, Visuals are an international Language.

Now say you have a team of Computer Programmers who’ve been collecting data from your servers for years. You need to show your shareholders how many subscribers you have gained and lost over the last 3 years.

Your Computer Programmers come back with a brilliant Bar Chart but its kind of dull. Well maybe spruce it up, turn the Bar Chart into a Line Graph and from there create a Roller Coaster going up and down.

Now obviously you have to keep a certain degree of professionalism but this is Visual Storytelling. Taking an Oral, Written or in rare cases, Plain Visuals and sprucing them up to tell a story.

The Human Brain is wired to take in Visuals, in fact 90% of the information our Brain takes in, is Visual.

So, it's definitely worth using.

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A Brief History Of Visual Storytelling

The first known Image we can see Visualised is 45,000 Years old and was found in Indonesia. It was simply Two Hand Prints and a Pig.

The meaning of this is long lost but later Cave Paintings do tell stories we can understand. Some detail Hunts and more importantly how to Hunt or what animals to avoid. 

Warnings have been a fairly mainstay part of Visual Storytelling throughout History. As time went on we began using them for more complex purposes. In the present Day we can use them to show case topics discussed during an event or present a plan for a Company.

Visual Storytelling can even be used simply to tell the story of your Business via an Animation. This Old Tradition has had a lot of time to perfect itself.

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How To Use It

We’ll go over this in the next blog but for now if you have any more questions or would like us to go over ways we can help you with Visual Storytelling, feel free to contact us!