Visual Storytelling, an Effective Method to Engage and Communicate
Published January 30, 2012“How to tell a story and tell it well?”…that is the question. Photography is mostly used to transmit a message. More than just transposing an instant from one time/space location to many others, it is mostly use to transpose a set of emotions, ideas, via the complex use of the photographer’s perspective. The way we see things has more to say, very often, then what we choose to communicate. But images have their limitations.
Since it’s inception, photography has relied on text captioning to close the gab between the visualization and the understanding. The rule has been that accompanying every image should be a text explaining what is in the image. In the photojournalistic world, it is called the W’s : Where, When, What, Who, Why. In the majority of cases, it travels with the images as an embedded text file, with complicated rules created by a committee of important people, only to reappear when the image is published, as a blob of text underneath the image.
The major issue with this antiquated way of explaining an image is that a reader constantly has to leave the image to read the caption and leave the caption to look at the image. When dealing with a large group of people, for example, it becomes an arduous exercise to find out who is that person in the second row in the back. Usually, the image with the caption looks something like this :
Try to find out the name and position of the man sitting right under the Roosevelt painting.
The same image with Stipple :
Stipple simply and elegantly solves this problem. By tagging directly into the image, the dynamic of storytelling changes entirely. There are no more interruptions. The reader can stay on the image while getting the information he needs; no more complicated going back and forth.
While extremely useful for news photography, Stipple can be used for any type of images : Sport photography can be enhanced by stats, charts and videos:
credit Keith Allison
Travel photography can have an array of useful information, some updated real time, like local weather, corresponding to the time the viewer sees the images :
Photo credit : malias
It can also be extremely useful for scientific images:
Of course, Stipple is not limited to photographs. It works very well with any type of visuals, like drawings for examples:
Just imagine how the design of your site can be positively affected. Not only do you save all the space previously taken by ugly caption text, but you also provide a more intuitive way for your visitors to travel throughout your site, linking specific part of an images to different areas. Instead of providing a very structured and rigid, if not boring pathway, you now offer a discovery-based navigation that lets users decide where they want to go based on their personal taste and desires.
With Stipple on your site, you greatly enhance your storytelling, creating a more natural and user friendly narrative that gently and elegantly guides your visitors, allowing for a more conversational type navigation. Stipple is extremely easy to use and install. In most cases takes less than 5 minutes to be up and running. If you have every installed google analytics or any other similar service on your web site, then you already know how to install Stipple! Sign up now.
- This post was written by Paul Melcher, Stipple’s VP for Image Licensing.
