Payman Taei

#204: How to Apply the Art of Visual Storytelling

#204: How to Apply the Art of Visual Storytelling

A picture is worth a thousand words. But using visuals without intentional delivery means your audience is left interpret to them. Therefore, it’s essential that narrative framework is utilized in your visual storytelling for your envisioned story to be understood.

Our guest, Payman Taei, is an expert in this field. He’s the founder of Visme, a visual communication tool for creating engaging presentations, infographics and other visual content. Payman has learned how to tell great visual stories and what mistakes create confusion for your audience. In this episode, he’ll share how you can turn your data into drama through visual storytelling.

To tell a story through an image, the presenter must guide their audience through an intentional journey, or story cycle. This is because our human brains, without careful instruction, create our own meaning.

Therefore, using narrative framework throughout the three critical elements of visual storytelling is the only way you can accurately convey the intended outcome to your audience.

Visme is an avenue to amplify the message that you are giving. But you could hamper your storytelling if you are not using narrative structure to take your audience on your deliberate journey. ~Payman Taei

Topics Discussed in this Episode

• Three critical elements in visual storytelling
• How visuals, if not used correctly, can actually hinder your story
• The top 19 design mistakes and how you can avoid them
• Why storytelling through visuals is a crucial component to the practice of storytelling
• Why narrative structure applies to all storytelling, including visual storytelling

Resources & Links

• Visme 
• Story Cycle 
• Visme on Twitter 
• Visme on Instagram
• Payman Taei on Linkedin 
• Edward Tufte’s four books on the use of visuals 
• The Columbia Space Shuttle disaster in January 2003

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