10 Visual Storytelling Tools You Need to Try

Capture and keep your audience’s attention with an immersive visual narrative.

There are many ways to go about visual storytelling — from animated text, charts and illustrations, through to immersive full-width video and photo scrollytelling experiences. Yet the underlying purpose remains the same: to capture and reward your audience’s attention.

While they may look complex to build, there are a number of powerful visual storytelling tools out there to help you create stunning visual narratives — including no-code web creation platforms which don’t require any developer input. Let’s take a look at some that you should try.

What is Visual Storytelling?

Visual storytelling is all about creating narrative-driven websites or content that offers visually rich and compelling user experiences. It puts your audience at the center of the action, taking them on a stimulating journey where each new section reveals something new and exciting, and effortlessly pulls them through to the next.

Given the range of visual media and design techniques available on the web, there is no singular way of going about it. A visual story can make use of any combination of graphic illustrations, typography, video, photography, data visualizations, animations, and interactive effects.

This makes visual storytelling appealing to a huge variety of digital publishers, including:

• News outlets and journalists looking to provide readers with a deeper understanding of the context and details of a particular event or topic.
• Brands looking to raise awareness and excitement around their products or services — and ultimately make their brand more memorable.
• Designers and other creatives looking to communicate their skills and creative approach to potential clients in a highly authentic and personal format.

Visual Storytelling Tools Every Designer Should Know

Let’s take a look at ten visual storytelling tools that simplify the process of putting together captivating and informative content.

1.Vev

Here at Vev, we aim to empower everyone to create visually imaginative web content, full of interactivity, animations, and stunning visual effects.

Vev is unique to this list in that it offers a variety of visual storytelling tools and ready-made layout elements. This means you can simply drag-and-drop advanced features to your design, including:

• Scrollytelling images and videos
• Horizontal scrolling
• Video/audio embeds
• Animated charts
• Parallax scrolling
• Hover, load, click and scroll animations

Rather than using a number of different tools, our all-in-one solution offers you a time-saving and budget-friendly way to start crafting breath-taking visual narratives. The example above was made in Vev by Hakai Institute. The Big Slide tells the story of a major landslide in British Columbia, utilizing Vev’s scrollytelling effects and striking photos and videos to aid their audiences understanding of the story, evoke emotion, and create interest in the content at hand.

Vev also gives you the freedom to publish your story anywhere — either embedded within a CMS, hooked up to an existing website, or hosted through Vev.

2. Flourish

Data visualizations not only add to the artistry of a design but help people in understanding the ideas or concepts that they represent. If your story has statistics, time series data, or other details that you want to tell through graphics, Flourish offers a straightforward way to create interactive visualizations. 

As one of the most popular visual storytelling tools out there, Flourish offers a wide variety of templates like animated charts, interactive maps, zoomable hierarchies, and other styles of data visualizations. It’s simple to import your data through a plethora of file types, as well as customize your graphics depending on the requirements of your design or the type of narrative you are crafting. This example from Sky News about deaths from vaccine-preventable diseases showcases the power that data visualizations combined with scrollytelling can have.

Once you’ve created a data visualization, you can seamlessly add it to your Vev design by dragging and dropping a Flourish element onto your canvas.

3. Lottie Animations

There are many ways to use After Effects to create animations that are perfect for visual storytelling. Advanced animations like kinetic typography, 3D graphics, and motion graphics can add so much to a web design. If you want to use animations you created in After Effects in your visual storytelling content, Lottie animations are the answer. Lottie files are vector based, making them easy to scale, as well as being small in size so that they don’t put a dent in your website’s load times.

If you want to use Lottie animations in your visual storytelling web designs, Vev makes it possible to import them in a few simple steps.

4. Visme

We’re always impressed by visual storytelling tools that make the job of working with data less time-consuming, and Visme stands out with its sense of simplicity.  Visme offers gorgeous templates, a library of graphics to choose from, and customization in how visualizations look and what type of data blocks you can include.

Once you’ve put together your infographic, you can then embed it in your Vev design using our Embed Anything feature.

5. Storytale

Using illustrations in your storytelling content is one of the most popular methods to convey a narrative visually. It can be hard to track down stock images and graphics that don’t feel generic. Storytale has a fantastic library of stylized illustrations as well as 3D graphics that have warmth and personality. There are quite a few aimed at tech and startups, but you’ll also find lifestyle and other non-work related images that will add a bit of a human touch to your visual storytelling web designs.

6. ThingLink

When telling visual stories, you need to pay attention to how you reveal information. If you put huge amounts of content out there all at once, you will overwhelm and confuse your audience. Interactive visuals that have hotspots are a great way to break up the flow of information. ThingLink is one of the better visual storytelling tools out there that removes the complexity from creating interactive visuals.

ThingLink offers a simple way to create interactive graphics and photos with icons that can be clicked to reveal further data, or trigger sounds like music or audio of people speaking. We like the straightforward UI that makes it easy to upload media like audio, add animated icons, as well as put together informational panels.

To get access to the code to embed these interactive visuals into your Vev project, you’ll have to sign up for a paid plan, but if you’re a designer who often has to make interactive images, it might be your new best friend. Alternatively, try drag-dropping our “Labeled Image” element in Vev to achieve a similar result.

7. Infogram

Infogram has something for everyone looking to create infographics. For those who don’t have a lot of design experience, they offer plenty of professional-looking templates. If you want to create infographics from scratch, anybody who has used image editing software can jump in and add graphics, maps, shapes, charts, and additional layers through its familiar UI. Infogram also gives you the code necessary for popping these data visualizations into your Vev project through our Embed Anything feature — so extra points.

8. Mapbox Studio

Location can be a huge part of a story and giving visitors a map can help them in understanding where it happened as well as communicate additional details. Mapbox Studio offers a straightforward template designed specifically for visual storytelling, making map generation a trouble-free process. Once you’ve got your map, you can easily embed it into your Vev project.

9. Adobe Stock

There are plenty of options for finding photos and videos for your web designs, but consistency can be an issue.

With a reputation built on the quality of their design software, you can trust that Adobe’s stock video and image libraries won’t let you down. Adobe Stock comes through with a gigantic library of stock photos and video clips, suitable for almost any story you want to tell. 

10. Figma

When prototyping for the web, Figma is a winner. The freedom of the canvas and workflow lends itself to designers who want to create something truly unique. Once you’ve designed or storyboarded a visual narrative in Figma, you can then easily import it into Vev through our Figma plugin to bring it to life. From Vev, it’s easy to apply advanced animations and interactive effects, and adjust your design for all screen sizes. Once you’re ready, you can then publish it anywhere on the web. Watch the tutorial here.

Try Our Visual Storytelling Tool for Free

Vev makes it beautifully simple for designers to create immersive visual stories on the web without needing a developer. Whether you’re building an infographic, illustration-led scrollytelling piece, or photo essay — use our pre-coded design elements and animations to bring your idea to life just as you imagined it. Publish your story anywhere on the web when you’re ready.