10 Digital Storytelling Examples (And Techniques to Try)

Digital storytelling enables journalists, publishers, and content marketers to craft visually compelling stories for the web.

The web has transformed the way the world tells stories. The rapid advance of interactive design techniques and tools has opened up new avenues of creative expression that let storytellers bring narratives to life. Today, digital stories don’t have to be static, linear affairs made up of fixed text and image blocks—they don’t even have to follow a traditional vertical experience.

While there’s a multitude of digital storytelling examples out there to explore, we’ve curated a small selection to highlight the sheer versatility of design techniques you can play with to tell engrossing, memorable stories on the web.

What is Digital Storytelling?

Following the shift from print to digital media from the late ‘90s, digital storytelling quickly established itself as one of the most powerful and influential ways to tell a story. At its simplest, it allows storytellers to break free from traditional media to leverage visually dynamic digital elements—including video, illustrations, 3D objects, and animations—which allow audiences to experience and interact with stories.

Today, digital storytelling is a staple for modern journalism—from illustrated features and animated reports, through to cinematic long-form web editorials. Increasingly, it’s also being adopted by brands and organizations looking to promote their own values, campaigns, and stories in a more engaging way.

Bottom line: digital storytelling isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s constantly evolving. As more publishers and companies move to adopt professional no-code design software, crafting immersive digital stories is now faster, cheaper, and more accessible than ever.

Example Digital Storytelling Design Techniques

Just as there is no single way to tell a story, there is no “correct” way to tell a digital story. However, look a little harder at some of the web’s best digital storytelling examples and you’ll notice that there are a few design techniques and tricks that publishers use again and again. These focus on weaving text and visuals together to create informative and captivating user experiences. Here are some of the most popular techniques to look out for:

Scrollytelling

Scrollytelling, with its elements of interactivity and motion, is the perfect medium for digital storytelling. Through scroll-triggered visual and text effects, animations, audio, graphics, and a careful pacing of content, scrollytelling produces engrossing cinematic narratives. Many of the digital storytelling examples we’ll cover below use this technique throughout their designs, and some even take scrollytelling in a whole new direction using horizontal scrolling.

Animation

Animation brings instant magic to digital stories—sliding text into place, spinning images across the screen, pulsating graphic design elements, and causing elements to scale, materialize, and disappear. All this movement is great for attracting readers’ attention, making it a great technique for highlighting key points and keeping people engaged.

Interactions

Most digital storytelling examples feature micro-interactions and other interactive elements. Interactions like clickable show/hide elements, hover effects, scroll-triggered animations, and other user-initiated actions let visitors explore at their own pace and even provide feedback. Interactivity is a brilliant way to immerse your audience in your story by making them actively participate in it.

Audio

Used sensitively, sound can bring a rich new sensory dimension to stories. It’s particularly useful for providing feedback when visitors complete a micro-interaction, creating ambiance with scroll-triggered sound effects, and weaving audio clips of people speaking.

Video

So many digital storytelling examples use video—and for good reason. Video instantly creates a more dynamic user experience, and can take a variety of forms. Short clips can be used in scrollytelling and hero sections against minimalist text, longer clips can be embedded to provide more detail or tangential stories, and short vignettes can be sewn throughout to create energy and relieve text-heavy sections.

10 Digital Storytelling Examples to Inspire You

What story do you want to bring to life with rich media? Let’s dive into ten different digital storytelling examples to analyze the different techniques and ideas to try in your own digital content.

1 News

In this essay published by the New Zealand media outlet 1 News, the author recounts his friendship and travels with a friend who has passed on. Built with Vev, the heartfelt writing in this piece is gorgeously complemented by scroll-triggered effects including fade-ins, scrollytelling images, and parallax. All work together to create a visually rich and dynamic experience that keep you scrolling, without ever overpowering the highly personal and touching copy.

Spor

Digital storytelling is a great choice for brands looking to “gently” market their products. Spor manages this masterfully in this example, showing off their jewelry by telling the story of an apple farmer. This design is filled with visuals that capture the artistry of Spor’s jewelry in a way that feels connected to nature.

This piece makes takes advantage of Vev’s ready-made digital storytelling components—including parallax image, embedded video, and complex animations—to produce a seamless scrolling experience.

UAID

UAID tells the story of the Ukraine war through animated text conversations. From the very moment bombs begin dropping, we see a text exchange between two people. While this is fictionalized voyeurism, it’s based on real events. Seeing this conversation unfold as the war progresses is not only an extremely interesting way to highlight key events—it ensures attention stays focused on how those events impact the very real people caught up in the conflict. This impactful digital storytelling example showcases the emotive power of a simple text animation used in the right design setting.

Hidden Heroes

Hidden Heroes is a space for celebrating individuals who helped advance technology that have been overlooked by historical narratives. In this digital storytelling example, screen space is maximized, yet we are not overwhelmed with too much content being squeezed into it. Even with maximalism, it’s important to leave some room for your content to breathe.

Hover effects open up new windows that provide more information about each person’s contributions to technology. This choice brings pleasing interactivity to the overall experience, while ensuring content doesn’t become too dense. Along with hover effects, scroll-triggered fade-ins and other animations lend this design a dynamic feel and guide people through its content.

Hearing Birdsong

Hearing Birdsong takes what would otherwise be the sterile and clinical experience of testing your hearing, and turning it into an exploration of birds and the sounds they create. In this digital storytelling example, you are put at the center of the experience and walk through the woods while listening to the sounds around you. This immersive digital story is filled with animation and sound, making evaluating your hearing an enjoyable and rewarding journey.

Yuri Gargarin

This digital storytelling example tells the story of Yuri Gargarin, the first Soviet cosmonaut. Along with writing that describes his launch into space, there are a multitude of eye-catching visuals that activate when you scroll. As you read about Yuri’s mission, you’ll see an animation depicting the different stages of his rocket in flight. This not only conveys information about how the rocket worked but adds a sense of zero-gravity weightlessness to the design. You’ll also encounter text animations, parallax scroll effects, and plenty of other cosmic-themed visuals that make this an action-packed and fun user experience.

Service Now

This sustainability report by Service Now was built with Vev and is a prime digital storytelling example using some of our favorite Vev features.

The content features snappy scroll-triggered animations throughout. One section of the report utilizes a horizontal sliding block of text where experts weigh in on data privacy, with each speech bubble sliding in as you scroll. This gives you a bit of a pause between sections, as well as giving focus to each new block of content that moves into place.

Animated charts are also used to incorporate data into the story being told. Using Vev’s animated chart element, the charts fade in and grow as you scroll down the page, slowly drip-feeding key parts of the story being told.

This is another one of the digital storytelling examples we came across that does an excellent job of using animations and effects in bringing attention to its content.

Nel Mentre

Not every story has to have a clear written narrative. This digital storytelling example from Nel Mentre just uses sound and visuals—as opposed to loads of text—to show how their scented candles can be used.

Every room in this design captures a mood. Accompanying these spaces are ASMR-inspired sounds, like the flipping of cards or the turning of pages in a book. Each begins with a delightful crack and burst of flame as a match lights a candle. This design is all about experience—communicating the atmosphere and care that makes their product.

Nattog Oslo Bergen Sov

Wonder what it’s like to take the night train from Oslo? This digital storytelling example built in Vev has you sorted. Combining embedded videos and video background sections, scrollytelling, static photos, and animated text, this long-form advertorial is a feast for the senses. Half-photo diary, half journal entry, this digital experience invites readers on board to journey directly alongside the writer.

Seen

With colorful three-dimensional animations and a scattering of sparkling stars, this digital storytelling example from Seen feels like being teleported to a different universe. It tells the stories of different creatives with plenty of brilliant visuals and motion.

The left-hand side of the screen displays a menu of different people. Clicking each individual link shifts the stars, shapes, and colors of the background into a new screen—a dazzling interaction that cleverly signals movement to a new page of content. From here, animated speech bubbles reveal interviews with these featured creatives, in a flourish that is far more interesting than text only.

Create Your Own Digital Stories with Vev

Ready to bring your stories to life with slick visuals, interactions, and animations? Check out Vev! Our extensive library of pre-coded digital storytelling design elements—spanning scrollytelling, advanced animations, video sections, horizontal scroll, and even 3D objects—lets you create immersive digital stories without needing a developer. Publish your story on the web when you’re ready, or embed it into your existing CMS.