The 5 Principles and 10 Building Blocks of Persuasive Visual Storytelling
- By Cliff Atkinson
- 11/22/2018
- Introducing the BBP Story Template
- The Five Principles of Visual Storytelling
- Principle 1: Nail Down the Story Before the Slides
- Principle 2: Reformat Your Information for a Yes-No Decision
- Principle 3: Start with No to Get to Yes
- Principle 4: Always Keep the End In Mind
- Principle 5: Think Like a Storyboard
- The 10 Building Blocks of a Persuasive Storyboard
- Building Blocks 1-4: The Hook, The Relevance, The Challenge, and The Desire
- Building Blocks 5-7: The Map, The Anchors, and The Explanation
- Building Blocks 8-10: The Headlines, The Visuals, and The Flow
- Sketching the First Five Slides
- Sketching the Remaining Slides
- Applying Custom Layouts
- Adding Graphics to the First Five Slides
- Adding Graphics to the Remaining Slides
- Stepping Into the Screen
- Documenting the Experience
- Getting Started with the BBP Story Template
- Writing Headlines Using Three Ground Rules
Applying Custom Layouts
After your team has agreed to and signed off on the sketches, the last step is to find and add a specific photograph, chart, or other graphic to each of the slides. But before you do that, you’ll apply custom layouts to each of the different sections of your storyboard, according to the way you sketched the layout of each slide. As shown in Figure 3-16, this creates a visual foundation for the slides based on the hierarchy from the story template.
)
FIGURE 3-16 Storyboard with custom layouts applied.
By applying layouts and backgrounds, you use graphical indicators that cue working memory to the relative importance of each slide, as shown in Figure 3-17. In this example, the slides with the solid sage background are the most important slides; the slides, with the horizontal gold background are the second-most important, and the slides with the white background are the third-most important.
){kind=link}