Summary of chapter 15 of visual design solutions

  As the combination of images and words, visual storytelling takes an important role on conveying narrative stories to evoke viewers’ emotions or arouse their curiosities about some particular topics.

  In many people’s view, narrative stories are just for children or teenagers who are interested in dramatic stories like comics which provide a sequence of events and stimulate their interests on continual reading to till the final result. Actually, narrative stories are indeed appropriate for adults as well to facilitate read a chunk story and provide a common understanding which can be interpreted by their own experiences.

  Normally, a narration includes a trigger problem or event, elaborations for the problem and the final problem solving. “This type of sequence is a comfortable and familiar approach to storytelling.” (page 287) In this case, a visual storytelling can really benefit for expressing talent ideas or oriented persuading by depicting sequential events around a specific topic or showing what the characters are saying and thinking in particular situations to arouse sympathy.

  For learning, visual storytelling can make the story more meaningful by implementing creative and effective illustrations or photographic. Designers can use realistic drawings to enhance visual appealing and cartoon illustrations to exaggerate some features of particular characters or hot events in a humorous way and even stock photos to express varied gestures and emotions clearly.

  To reinforce expression deeply, designers can also choose a photo album which includes a series of customized photos around a same topic. Professionally, designers can use photo essay which places captions blow each photo to help viewers quickly get the key point for understanding when illustrating an educational concept or scientific issue.

  For designing a narrative story, we always divide the chunk story into several panels in intended sequence like a comic to make it easier for reading and understanding. Because of our physiological and cognitive mechanism, we usually perceive objects from left to right and top to bottom. So it’s necessary to arrange panels in this way to suit for our visual convention and guide viewers’ visual sequence.

  “Each panel or frame usually represent a moment in time, but it can also represent different views or places where the action is happening simultaneously.” (page 294) In this case, we need pay attention to the continuity of panels by choosing appropriate texts and images to avoid disorienting the meaning of the story and we also need know control the pace formed by gutters which may influence the influence viewers’ initiative on keeping attention.

  To make panels more vivid and interesting for engaging viewers and catch their attraction, we can integrate diverse types of word or speech balloons and pictorial devices into our panel design. For example, we can use word balloons with dashed lines as the background of whispering and balloons with a cloud shape as the background of thinking besides the characters. In addition, we can utilize action lines for movement and heart shapes between characters to show their love and concentric curved lines to represent noise or sound.

  Although it’s a little difficult to implement camera shots and angels to enhance expression of panels, we can still try it when needed because sometimes they can really help convey ideas and emotions efficiently. For instance, we can use close-up shot to emphasize a part of objects or human bodies to establish a prominent view and usually it’s a good idea to convey admiration for someone from worm’s-eye view.