Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

The Hero and the Villain

Every visual story has a goal, or a desired future state. This is the ultimate objective that you want the audience to support. Giving the audience this desire to achieve the goal is key to the decision making process.

Characters take on the roles of hero and villain from the inciting incident, the point when an event begins the sequence of actions that will eventually lead to the goal of the story. Their roles come to an end when the climax of the story is resolved and the story goal is achieved.

The hero is a label we give to the character the audience believes is striving for the story goal. The villain is competing with the hero in order to bring about a different goal. Objectively, the story is about the conflict between these characters to achieve the goal. Every other character in the visual story is there to support or influence the progress of the hero or the villain.

Some people talk about these roles as protagonist and antagonist. The protagonist is in essence the lead character in a story, and the antagonist is in opposition to the protagonist. Like it or loathe it, the word ‘hero’ is perceived as being positive and ‘villain’ as negative. We don't expect the hero and villain in a visual story about business change to represent good and evil as that extreme is not usually very helpful, but we do want them to represent sufficiently different perspectives that the audience would rather choose to support the hero.

We made a difficult choice ...