Visual storytelling:
Start building more engaging content

Memorable, meaningful, and highly engaging, visual storytelling is the narrative technique powering the web’s most interesting content.

At its simplest, visual storytelling is a fancy term for the narrative technique of “showing, not telling”. Within web design, it’s the practice of using rich visual media such as graphic illustrations, photographs, video, and animated charts to tell immersive stories.

Since people respond to visual stimuli at a much faster rate—and on a more personal level—than just text alone, visual storytelling is a great tool for turning complex information into easily-digestible, engaging stories.

Naturally, this has made it a very attractive tool for digital marketers. Executed well, visual storytelling can produce captivating narratives and engaging digital experiences that resonate with audiences on a highly personal level. Often used for marketing initiatives, it’s used in everything from raising brand awareness, to generating sales and driving website traffic.

Widely popularized by publishers like the New York Times in the early 2000s, visual storytelling on the web stands in direct opposition to “fast”, clickbait content. It’s a long-form, intentionally “slow”, and indulgent content format designed for long attention spans. With a focus on craft, quality, and meaning, visual storytelling has quickly been adopted by content marketers to engage readers and communicate a premium brand identity.

Visual storytelling in and of itself isn’t a new concept—it’s been around since people first took pigment to stone and created stories on cave walls. Yet, within modern web design, it’s constantly shifting and changing. Web creatives are increasingly moving away from static visuals and the “H1, H2, paragraph text, single image” format that has dominated corporate web design for years.

Thanks to advances in web creation platforms, more people than ever are launching immersive visual experiences on the web, full of engaging animations and micro-interactions. As highly engaging pieces, these often involve a level of reader participation and personalization that other digital marketing formats simply can’t achieve.

There are so many ways to tell a compelling visual story on the web. With the right tools, you can easily experiment with different visual and graphic media, as well as slick animations, micro-interactions, and transitions. Here are a few of the most popular techniques you’ll want to familiarize yourself with.

You can draw on visual storytelling techniques to make any communication instantly more engaging—from advertorials and annual reports, to campaign landing pages and product demos. These visual storytelling examples showcase the creative ways content marketers across industries are tapping into the format.

Visual storytelling on the web used to require a lot of time and expensive developer resources—meaning only organizations with the biggest budgets could afford to produce them. As a specialist skill set, this also meant creative direction and control was often outsourced to external creative agencies.

Thanks to advances in the no-code development space, creative teams of all sizes are now able to quickly create compelling visual stories in-house for a fraction of the cost, with complete technical and creative freedom.

Tools like Vev allow non-technical content creators to create visual storytelling websites by dragging-and-dropping visual storytelling elements and animations. They also allow technical creators to weave in custom components without coding the basic stuff from scratch.

Ready to create your own visual story? Before you jump in, have a quick scan of these best practices to ensure you don’t confuse, overwhelm, or bore your readers.