Narrative Design
How I learned to stop playing charades and love design-driven storytelling.
A few years ago, I was illiterate.
Sure, I had a mastery of the English language. I’d accumulated a couple gold stamped diplomas and enough writerly jobs to prove it. But I couldn’t effectively communicate with large swaths of my industry.
I was a content strategist with a dark secret: I had no working knowledge of design tools.
Worse, I had even less understanding of how design can impact language. My creative process with designers began to look like a long game of charades where nobody wins:
Lots of enthusiastic pointing. Not much meaningful communication.
As someone who shapes and expresses ideas for a living, I know few things are more frustrating than a creative vision stifled. Almost as bad? Your creative vision diluted by a weak command of visual language. So I set out to build a new way of working and thinking as a writer: narrative design.
Narrative design is a double helix of words and visual language that combine to create immersive experiences. It unlocks another dimension to your writing that’s inaccessible by words alone. Read on to discover how the power of narrative design shows up at every stage of the creative process.
Frame the problem
As writers, we often miss the opportunity to sketch out our ideas. But inspiration can sprout from anywhere. Years ago in law school, I struggled with convoluted exam questions. They were always packed with moving parts and detailed characters. As a lifelong wordsmith, I was suddenly on Mars: drowning in prose and daunted by words. In desperation, I started doodling the facts of each case. As the sketches took shape so did my deepening understanding of visual language.
I still apply this narrative design tactic to my daily work. Going beyond journey maps to sketching touchpoints helps me discover where two brands overlap and form the basis for new product messaging.
Translate intangible aspects of a brand into a narrative design that reveals the intersections between companies, teams and ideas. That’s the birthplace of your content strategy.
Think of design as just another language at your disposal rather than a stumbling block. Start by conjuring up visuals that resonate with your message. Next, sketch a rough outline of what comes to mind.
That chicken scratch you see on the page? It’s the beginning of your design literacy. Respect it and your creative process will begin translating intricate, high-minded concepts into concrete, two-dimensional solutions.
Contain the problem
When writers and content strategists work closely with designers, crucial points can get lost in translation. Next time, think inside the box by translating your content requirements into visual form.
You’ll bring far more clarity to your conversations with designers. At Uber, I start refining the message by boxing it in. That way, we can collaborate across disciplines using a shared language.
The box also helps when you hit a wall: you’re forced to work differently, increase your visual fluency and shift your approach. When my writing skills feel dull on occasion, this exercise eases my mind into a more prolific mode where ideas flow and the pen (or cursor) takes over.
Next time you’re at an impasse, take a step back and consider ways to visualize your project’s parameters. Remember, the solution lives within those walls. All you have to do is find it.
Sell the solution
For writers, there’s a heavy emphasis on developing your creative process but not much on strong selling skills. Great content is near meaningless if it doesn’t make it past your first stakeholder. Ultimately, you need your project leads and clients to (a) get your points and (b) care about them. Narrative design works on both these fronts because people draw on the right combination of words and images to derive understanding and assign meaning to your ideas.
For that kind of buy-in, you need to develop design-driven storytelling skills that illuminate your points without obscuring the impact of your message.
Remember, design skills aren’t just for your private creative process. They’re the linchpin of selling your ideas. Share your more polished narrative designs. Stakeholders will understand your process and, ultimately, feel a sense of ownership in your ideas.
Don’t aim for pixel perfect. Even rough sketches will deepen the discourse around your work.
Naming explorations are a prime example. Arriving at the right name for a product or experience is nothing like it looks. It’s easy to assume writers just pluck the perfect words from the obscurity of their imagination.
The truth: naming explorations often start as a linguistic dragnet. The creative process is rigorous, time-consuming and demands the writer walk around all angles of a challenge.
Share this final part of your process with stakeholders. Don’t just list your naming options. Illustrate how you’ve breathed life into a product by using, say, a visual thesaurus design.
Why?
People will feel empowered to discover your ideas for themselves. Secondly, your narrative design will cement the crucial relationships between the words you’ve chosen. Third, when you illustrate your process, the messaging takes up residence within a larger constellation of existing products. Lastly, you’ll save time by showing your audience why more obvious naming options may not, in fact, have worked.
Bottom line: narrative design chops will shape your most impactful writing and get you to “yes” faster.
