Have you ever had to build flat-pack furniture? It can be quite a challenge. Often the written instructions are in a different language, but before we’re swept away in wave of frustration, coffee and Allen key stigmata we’re saved by the illustrated diagrams - by visuals, a universal language. This is just one example of how helpful and important visual thinking can be.

Visual storytelling can go a lot further than just saving us from flat-pack nightmares. From complex ideas and important information to heartfelt and powerful messages, visual storytelling is able to connect with us at a deep level. You may have seen it a lot in recent years as the popularity of video jumped up, but far from being the latest fashion, it’s a timeless classic.

What is visual storytelling?

Visual storytelling is the art of communicating messages, emotions, narratives and information in a way which reaches viewers at a deep and lasting level. Delivered through rich visuals, these are either recorded from the real world or created by artists and visual thinkers. And just like a flat-pack furniture, it comes in lots of shapes and sizes. It could be a post on Instagram, a political cartoon in a newspaper, a graphic novel, a well-shot YouTube video, some visual notes or an animation. This list is far from exhaustive, because visuals and the storytelling they deliver play a role in our life at almost every level.

Visual storytelling solutions are so common in our lives because they work; connecting with us while making information easy to understand and take onboard. In a nutshell, this is the power of visual storytelling. In part, this is due to the talents of the artist or director and in part it’s due to effectiveness of storytelling itself. Our brains are wired to understand and unpack stories; taking meaning from their structure, narrative, characters, references and tone. That list alone shows how many opportunities storytelling provides to add engagement, meaning and information. And our brains take all that meaning and information in flat-pack form, building it into the connected, memorable and complex ideas.

Depending on your visual storytelling solution and medium, the way visual storytelling works will differ. We are pioneers and experts in whiteboard animation, so we’ll focus on that. The joy of whiteboard animation is that you can create anything you can think of, making it a playground for imaginative and tailored storytelling that can get right to the heart of ideas and messages. Going further, whiteboard animation can then layer and connect your storytelling and information to give viewers a full and connected picture that fits together and connects.

In our whiteboard animations, we use several visual devices to harness the full power of visual storytelling:

• charming and engaging characters tailored to audiences and stories

• visual metaphors that translate a complicated idea into a more understandable form

• set pieces that connect a whole range of points together

• icons that capture meaning and crystalise information in small instantly recognisable illustrations

• cultural and popular references that make a message or idea easier to remember and understand

Visual storytelling - a brief history

Like we said in our introduction, there is nothing new about visual storytelling. As far as we can tell, people have been using visual storytelling for at least 45,500 years - creating beautiful cave paintings like these in Indonesia - which have survived the test of time and still move people today. Storytelling like this isn’t just an early part of humanity’s history, for many of us it may well be an early part of our own lives in the form of picture books. Our Managing Senior Creative Dan Stirrup wrote about the power of picture books as he introduced them to his son, describing his own feelings seeing them again.

"I knew immediately that I had read this book when I was a child, such was the power of a single illustration."

Dan’s experience shows the impact these early stories have on us and how visual storytelling stays with us. Fast-forwarding slightly, YouTube and Instagram show how the popularity of visuals shows no sign of changing. Whether you’re interested in discovering ways to work or eagerly waiting for the next instalment in a YouTuber’s travel diary, technology is only making visual storytelling more popular and more accessible.

The rise of explainer videos is another sign of this popularity and relevance, and the way we connect with information in these videos is a great example of the importance of visual storytelling . YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world. Who among us can say they haven’t searched ‘how to…’ in the hope that there is a video ready to reveal all. We contributed to this in our own way by helping to pioneer the whiteboard animation format while creating the RSA Animates series, a series of animated 10-minute lectures which today have had over 100,000,000 views.

The power of visual storytelling

"RSA Animates had proved so incredibly popular and showed us that people were hungry for ideas presented in creative, engaging and accessible ways."

— Mairi Ryan, Joint Head of the Public Events Programme at the RSA

The RSA Animates series’ 100,000,000 views shows the power of visual storytelling. It made abstract and complex ideas engaging, memorable and importantly entertaining enough to clock up as many views as Gangnam Style! The key difference here is that while Gangnam Style is just an ear worm, the RSA Animates have gone on to inspire a generation of teachers, economists and psychologists.

As well as the talent of the creators and the power of storytelling, our brains play a big role in the success of visual storytelling (but don’t tell them, it will go straight to their ego). They’re wired for visual processing! Neuroscientists at MIT found that the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. The study highlighted our brain’s ability to make sense of even briefly presented images, which makes sense when you consider that more than 50% of the cortex is devoted to processing visual information.

Visual storytelling is perfectly placed to make the most of our brain’s talent for visual thinking, and its ability to make information engaging and memorable was shown recently in a study by the Chinese University of Hong Kong. 92.7% of the students asked said the animations were helpful in understanding texts and clarifying concepts. This is a triumph for visuals, but the results of the study go much further in highlighting the importance of visual storytelling. Visual storytelling creates a deeper emotional connection with viewers and that is in part what makes the storytelling so effective.

But just like anyone who got their flat-pack with some key tools missing will know there is more than one size of Allen key, not all visuals were created equally. We had the pleasure of working with Richard Wiseman, Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire. We couldn’t resist asking him if he’d like to conduct some research with us and we were very happy when he said yes. Together we compared ‘talking head’ videos with whiteboard animations and found that the whiteboard video was:

• 66% more likely to be shared

• resulted in a 15% increase in information retention

• was 33% more entertaining

The research shows that visual storytelling is effective, but the visuals you choose can make all the difference in deciding how effective it is. The combination of our brains, how we learn and the visuals we choose gives visual thinking two communication superpowers:

• Through tools such as visual metaphors, it can make very complex ideas simple and easy to understand

• Visuals make the information more entertaining, making less interesting subjects engaging and memorable

What are the benefits of visual storytelling?

Visual storytelling provides many more benefits than these and first on the list is holding our attention. There are a lot of stats out there about shrinking attentions and it can be hard to find academic sources for them. One thing we can all agree on though, is that there is a lot of competition in today’s world for our attention and this is where visual storytelling’s ability to engage and entertain becomes so important. These give it the edge to overcome the other distractions your audience might be facing.

Another great benefit of visual storytelling is its ability to bring our stories into the realm of video. Video is becoming increasing popular and it’s a trend which has been here for several years now. Cisco predict that by 2022 video will make 82% of consumer internet traffic, Cisco also found that mobile video consumption has increased 17 fold since 2012. These show that a lot of visual storytelling is happening through video and the way we access it is changing.

Visual storytelling makes your message very versatile and perfect for social media, allowing your visual storytelling to reach a lot more people. Research by Buzzsumo found that Facebook posts with images see 2.3X more engagement than those without images and that articles with an image once every 75-100 words received double the social media shares as articles with fewer images.

Beyond helping your message to reach far and wide, visual storytelling brings added depth and accessibility to your storytelling - helping you to tell your story and share your message in a way which has the greatest possible impact with your audience. Speaking to us about the RSA Animates, the RSA’s Abi Stephenson said:

“Animation reduces those barriers and opens up a world of ideas to everyone, so that we don’t have to fight to become informed about the world around us.”

Visual storytelling gives you all the tools to open up a whole new world of possibilities, giving you new ways to build your story and an even greater ability to share it. We are passionate about visual storytelling and its power to bring the messages and ideas audiences need to hear to life. As specialists in whiteboard animation, we have done this for organisations like the BBC, the RSA, TED-Ed, Coca Cola, iKea, eBay and Deloitte.

If you have a story, message or idea you want to share, we’d love to hear from you. Book a discovery call today!