From Storytelling To Scrollytelling: A Short Introduction and Beyond*
Likely you have already heard about (Visual) Storytelling. It is a design concept applied in Journalism, Business, Sport, Medicine, Education, and Science. Its exploration keeps growing thanks to the availability and application of a wide variety of techniques.
Also called Narrative Visualisation, it consists of creating a logical sequence of related (data-driven) visualisations, or visual elements, needed to convey a message to an audience in an engaging and effective way.
In the information explosion era, everybody needs a story, everybody needs a narrative (and quickly!). Even if there is a distinction between story and narrative, it is not always clear and the term “story” is often used in a broader sense to indicate a sequence of events communicated through story-like elements. When a story is prevalently delivered by using visual representations, it becomes a visual story: more intuitive, engaging and concise; see “A picture is worth a thousand words”.
The Basics
First of all, it is important to be conscious of the various possibilities of creating a visual story. There exist several forms of visual storytelling depending on the genre (e.g., video, data-comics, partitioned poster), visual narrative (e.g., highlighting, transition…
