Exploring Visual Narratives

Mastering visual storytelling is a valuable skill. There are many ways to tell a story with pictures—or, in this case, sketches! You’ll hear this described in many ways: storyboard, comic, vignette, illustrated scenario, sketchnote, and so forth. In this chapter, we describe the basic process of telling a story with images as a ‘visual narrative’ because it can encompass all of the above and allows us to share the process without getting too bogged down in terminology. There are some distinctions which might be helpful to share; so we will describe them in this chapter. A visual narrative is simply a way of visualising a story, a sequence of events. Comics can also be described as scenarios—what we call ‘visual narrative’ differs between practitioners and fields. Someone working in UX will likely have a storyboard or scenario, an illustrator or artist might make a comic (or a graphic novel if it is very long!). In reality though, there are no hard distinctions in terms of content, as long as the meaning and story you are trying to convey is clear, and you frame your work appropriately for the domain it will be used in.