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

Writing

You can find many great books that cover writing styles. In just a few pages, we can barely scratch the surface, and in reality, if you are against the clock to create your first visual story, you don't have time to change much of your personal style. Here, we focus on three recommendations that have proven time after time to make a big difference: keep it simple, speak directly to your audience, and make it personal.

The balance of words and pictures varies between formats. It's not automatically good or bad to use words or pictures or both. The goal is to use the right mix for the situation and to use words and pictures to convey ideas, direct content, and supporting information as appropriate. If questions arise about something being clear, use more than one visual device for a concept to give the audience more than one chance to absorb the information.

Good textual content is vital for posters and infographics. Callouts, panels, and headings lead the reader around the content. One-page designs are often used as posters where there is no presenter to tell the audience how to read it so the words have to do a lot of work.

Keep It Simple

Great communicators keep it simple. But you've probably heard the old expression, “I'm sorry this is such a long letter, I didn't have time to write you a short one.” Simple is hard to do. It often takes willpower and courage, because simple is the opposite of how most communication is done in big organizations, academia, and government. ...