Stories by design
Why design is like a great novel
As a designer now of 7ish years, I’ve learned my hard lessons, I’ve had crappy clients, dry stints, print screw ups, typos, etc. Though through it all the biggest thing I’ve learned is that content is king. I’ve focused too much on the form and less of the function. I’ve spent hours on communicating “cool” but not the message. I’ve sacrificed print space for pizazz, web pages for umph, and opportunities to share the greatest story ever for pride. What a fool I was.
Being a young designer you want to show off your tricks, and how good you think you are. But as you mature you realize you’re only as good as your ability to communicate a message, to captivate hearts, to make people feel something, believe something. That’s when you’ve done your job right, that’s when you can show off a little. And as I mature and realize being a truly great designer, web developer, writer, director, etc. isn’t about cool workspaces or mocking up iOS7 comps, it’s about being a great communicator.
People like stories. We’ve been telling them for centuries. We use them to express emotions, to go on journeys, to communicate complicated ideas, and to ease tension. Stories are many things, they don’t just reside in fiction books, though that is where they can sometimes shine the brightest, they are actually all around us (some still waiting to be discovered). A one page ad of a guy smiling with his pals drinking a PBR with a snowboard in his hands is telling us a story. It might not spell it out, but we fill in the blanks where we want to, our brains naturally do this, it wants to find connections. What our eyes don’t see the brain fills in. We don’t just see a guy drinking a beer, we see a version of ourself having the time of our life with our buds, while drinking a PBR. Which bring us to our first thought.
A story connects
I’m use to be an avid Devour user, always seeing what videos hit the web that were deemed worthy of being devoured. I once watched a video about this cute little 4 year old African boy fulfilling his bucket list. It was this joyful montage of seeing this sweet boy doing all the crazy things he would want to do before his potential death. I’ve seen countless ads for the need of good water in third world countries. I’ve always known people die from bad water, but seeing the message, “1 in 5 children will die from bad water”, and seeing this boy used as an example of the 1 out of 5, putting a face to a number made it real. I saw him get his first kiss, saw him see the ocean with wide eyed wonder and fear. I thought of how many more children would never experience those things, how this child, the one I saw laughing on screen could die from something as trivial as dirty water.
Emotion is best displayed by people not philosophy.
Though I may have known that dirty water was a leading cause in deaths in less fortunate countries, I didn’t understand what that meant until I saw it through the eyes of this child. See, emotions is best displayed by people not philosophy. A connection was made with that boy not the cause, but because we felt connected to the boy the cause now became something i actually was invested in. We were so invested in this little boy that my ex and I began talking about taking a trip to help dig wells in Africa. The connection was important in communicating the cause.
Conflict
It’s not a novel concept that conflict is needed to propel a story forward. Every piece of literature you will read will have conflict present. Though we as a human race strive for peace, we can’t tell one story without conflict. We don’t read stories of people where there are no issues, no growth, no villains, no hurdles to jump, there would be no interest for us to keep reading. We’d rather read about a characters journey through hell to get to heaven, we’d rather make a connection with a character who finds hope in hopeless circumstances.
The conflict can help create another connection but rather than with characters, it allows us to connect with circumstance.
These circumstances, villains, wars, heists, and even the protagonist’s own inner demons all helps further that connection for the reader or viewer. The battle for The Ring and Middle Earth to some can be the battle of temptation and purity, to others it might signify a conflict with a sickness, a relationship, or simply connect with us on our moral compass of good verse evil. The point is that the conflict draws the lines and asks the reader to pick a side, to decide on how “they” feel and what “they” would do, it allows them to relate in deeper levels and it turns the reader/viewer into a participating character in the narrative.
Challenge
This is a concept that is far too left out in modern story telling. So much focus goes into fancy explosions, or radical concepts that we aren’t challenging our audience. There are two different platforms from which challenge can be derived; physical and mental. The first would be displayed such as how certain technology works, the physical matter of the world and how it works. The latter would be wether using the technology is morally right.
A movie that challenged me in the physical platform was Looper, I was so caught up in the technology and the writer’s take on time travel that I was actually unable to really enjoy the movie. A show that challenged me mentally is Breaking Bad, I seemed to find my self conflicted with my feelings toward Walter White, and was conflicted with rooting for the meth cooking duo to get off Scott free.
I feel too many movies aim to either blow our minds with VFX or new concepts, rather than communicating to us the moral. All those great books you had to read in school were always difficult to read, though not because they were bad, but because they challenged you, It hurt to read them. You had to come to conclusions on what was right, and what was wrong, you had to choose what you believed, and that would shape your opinion about the characters and the story. Another great example is The Life of Pi which the whole story cascades to ask a question; Which story would you rather believe, the hard and sad practical story, or a story about zoo animals, a tiger named Richard Parker and odd floating islands. The writer goes on to show that we naturally choose to want to believe the more magical story, even though it requires more faith, but what story is genuinely true is up to the reader.
Challenging your reader is about creating an opportunity for your reader to feel or think a certain way, but letting them come to the conclusion.
There are thousands of opinions on becoming a strong story teller, and these are 3 ideas that I feel can help make you a better story teller. They aren’t the end all be all and they don’t cover every aspect, but they are needed. Most of us are gifted with story telling in one sense or another, the goal is to hold onto what you know, not try to hard, know what to say and what not to say, and not to forget the story amongst all the words.
