In the digital world, stories are everywhere. From social media to commercials to classrooms and everywhere in between. In fact, you probably see multiple stories each day, even if you don’t read them from a book or news article.
The reason stories are so popular, and so numerous, is because people connect with them. When they’re well-told, stories allow people to empathize and become interested in almost anything. They’re always relevant and have long been a part of human history.
Before technology enabled the creation of digital stories, there was a multitude of print sources such as magazines and newspapers that printed stories. Some of the most famous authors—for instance, Charles Dickens—spent large periods of time writing serialized novels for these publications. Even before print was readily available, cultures all over the world were passing down traditions and knowledge through oral storytelling.
Although there are still many cultures using oral storytelling, the numerous digital technologies available today open up a whole new world of possibilities for how storytelling can look. As technological advances have appeared, digital storytelling has become a popular and effective way to create a new tradition of storytelling communication.
What is Digital Storytelling?
To understand why digital storytelling is important, it’s key to understand what that term actually means.
At the most basic level, digital storytelling is a “presentation combining a variety of digital elements within a narrative structure (a story).” Types of media could include:
- Text
- Graphics
- Social media elements (for instance, a Tweet)
- Audio
- Video
- Interactive elements (like a digital map
Essentially, a digital story is one that uses multiple forms of media to tell narrative.
Other sources specify further that digital storytelling is often used to tell everyday people’s stories. As technology advances, it has become easier for a more diverse population of people to share their stories with the world. This is partly why digital storytelling has become a common practice in educational settings.
Digital stories are also often used in marketing to make a personal connection with potential customers and therefore market products and services to them more effectively.
According to the University of Houston and the Center for Digital Storytelling (CDS), there are seven elements in every digital story:
- Point of View: the main point of the story & the author’s perspective
- A Dramatic Question: a primary question that keeps the audience engaged & is answered by the end of the story
- Emotional Content: serious obstacles that arise and allow the audience to powerfully connect to the story on a personal level
- The Gift of Your Voice: how the story is uniquely told that helps the audience understand any necessary context
- The Power of the Soundtrack: sounds or music that enhance the story
- Economy: using the least amount of content possible to tell a good story, thus avoiding viewer overwhelm
- Pacing: how quickly or slowly a story progresses; it’s rhythm
What is Graphic Design & How Does it Relate to Digital Storytelling?
Graphic design can feel somewhat mysterious or vague as an industry. With graphics everywhere you look, and images performing all sorts of roles, it’s hard to know what a graphic designer might do or how to become one.
At the most basic level, Graphic Designers are professionals who communicate messages through visual representations. They can inform, inspire action, and connect directly with their audience through beautiful graphics. The graphic design industry has been around since the late 1800s when industrial technology made it possible to do more technically advanced design work separate from a publication’s written components. The term “graphic design” was coined in 1922.
What’s Included in the Graphic Design Industry?
While there’s an overwhelming number of images and types of design, there’s actually a specific set of services Graphic Designers typically offer.
According to industry research by IBISWorld, the graphic design industry is comprised of the following activities:
- Visual Communication Design
- Corporate Identification Design like logos
- Graphic Art, both commercial & independent
- Creating Illustrations, both commercial & independent
- Medical Illustrations, both commercial & independent
In a growing digital market, there are virtually limitless options for skilled Graphic Designers.
How is Graphic Design Related to Digital Storytelling?
The reason graphic design is connected to digital storytelling is that Graphic Designers are digital storytellers. They’re creative professionals who create images and content that tell effective stories.
Whether they’re working on a visual communication design, creating illustrations, or even creating business branding, each time a Graphic Designer completes a project, it tells a digital story.
What Tools are Used for Digital Storytelling?
Digital stories can come in all shapes and sizes. There are numerous ways to put them together, and each person approaches the creative process differently.
Despite the differences in how creatives tell digital stories, there is one set of tools that is known for its creative excellence and virtually limitless storytelling potential: the Adobe Creative Cloud.
These five Adobe programs are exceptional for creating moving digital stories.
Photoshop
Adobe Photoshop is the gold standard of photo editing software. In fact, a staggering 90% of creative professionals use it.
Photoshop users who know how to use the software can edit existing digital or digitalized photos (also called raster artwork), combine multiple images, and even create digital paintings. More advanced users can create GIFs—the brief, looped moving images you often see on social media—or even edit simple videos.
The most common use for Photoshop is digital image correction. You can do anything from correcting color to changing the background to adding or removing people from images. These are great tools to have when creating a digital story because you can change any element of an image you want—or create a completely new, imaginative image that tells the digital story just how you imagine it.
Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is the industry-leading vector graphics and illustration app. This versatile program is great for creating many kinds of artwork, most notably logos, icons, patterns, and product packaging.
The most common uses for Illustrator are to create company branding and intricately detailed or patterned designs. Its biggest strength, and what sets it apart from other design software, is the fact that it’s vector-based, which means that your designs are completely scalable. It also does extraordinarily well with pattern creation and minute details.
These are perfect assets for creating digital stories. With 90+ illustration tools and the ability to dive deep into color manipulation, the designs you can create in Illustrator are sure to win over any audience you choose.
InDesign
Adobe InDesign is the industry-leading software for page layout and design in both print and digital media. The publishing program is versatile, and users can create a number of different types of media including things like posters, books & eBooks, digital magazines, interactive PDFs, catalogs, and even resumes.
InDesign is essentially the meeting place for type and graphics, and excels in print design. Users who know the basics of the software can create multi-page documents with text and images, such as a brochure. More advanced users can customize designs to do formatting for larger projects such as books and digital catalogs.
If you love books and more traditional forms of storytelling, InDesign is a perfect tool to bring both print and digital creations to life in new and exciting ways.
Premiere Pro
Adobe Premiere Pro is the industry-standard video editing program. With this software, you can import video, music, sound, voiceovers, and graphics, put them into a timeline, and edit out unwanted parts to create a polished final video.
The program is designed for creatives who want to produce professional-quality videos and need the powerful tools and functions that will enable them to. One of the biggest perks of the program is the ability to edit video from many different cameras and formats. You can sync footage from multiple cameras, which is especially useful if you’re filming multiple perspectives.
Premiere Pro is one of the best tools for digital storytelling if you want to create video content.
After Effects
After Effects is one of Adobe’s most well-known and complex programs and the industry-standard for television motion graphics and visual effects. Using After Effects, creative professionals can animate motion graphics, create special effects, and do video compositing, motion tracking, and 3D camera tracking.
Some of the best features include the ability to fix errors during video post-production, remove items you don’t want in the short, fill in elements when the shoot is over, and create to your heart’s content with the expansive animation libraries.
For digital storytellers who want to create a moving video with cool effects, After Effects is a powerful tool to know and understand.
3 Reasons Storytelling is Critical for Graphic Design
At first glance, it may not seem like storytelling is that important to graphic design or Graphic Designers. After all, they’re designing, not telling stories, right?
It’s more complicated than that.
When Graphic Designers create any type of product for their employer or clients, they’re telling a story. It might be a brand story with logos and graphics to tell the story of the business. It might be the story of an underdog featured in a commercial to win new customers or clients. It might even be art itself—many creative businesses thrive on creating beauty and beautiful pieces of art their customers can both use and enjoy.
So being able to tell a good story as a Graphic Designer is a key skill. Here’s why stories work in the graphic design industry. These three reasons are all a part of graphic design because the images and designs are integral to creating the best possible storytelling effects.
Human Connection
No matter what you may design, if it’s meant to be shared, it must make some kind of human connection. Stories create this connection better than any other medium.
A good digital story can relate to someone on a personal level and hold their attention because they connect to it as someone with their own experiences. There are certain experiences, such as the awkwardness of a first day at a new school, that every person can relate to, so when you can design elements that remind your audience of this feeling, they’re hooked.
Stories also make people human instead of some unattainably perfect idea of a person. This is why we people click without thinking when a celebrity finds themself in a weird situation or has a similar opinion. Because it feels like real life, not a perfectly curated Instagram or Facebook feed. It’s also why people love to read about other “normal” people’s success—because if that other average person can do it, anything feels possible. This is the power of human connection.
Creating Change
Digital stories are uniquely positioned to help create change. They can provide a voice to those who might otherwise struggle to be heard.
Digital stories can also send strong messages. For instance, Dove has been on the forefront of body positivity, especially for young people, for many years. It had a series of commercials about self-image, including one about “real beauty” and one that illustrates a “reverse selfie” process. These powerful stories create strong messages of acceptance and look to create a change bigger than someone buying a Dove product.
Not to mention, digital storytelling makes storytelling accessible for many more types of people than traditional storytelling. There’s a lot of work being done with diversity and inclusion in the digital storytelling space, and this can lead to much-needed large-scale changes in the world.
Effective Marketing
Many people don’t or can’t distinguish between marketing and sales because they work closely together. This often makes marketing feel less desirable for companies who want to sell ethically. They’re not the same, though. Marketing is the industry, and advertising is a practice that falls within it.
Good marketing is about strategy—developing products people actually need and making sure they’re satisfied with it—not pushy sales. It stands to reason that using stories has quite a few advantages for those who actually want to make a difference and not just a pile of money. Stories allow real human connection rather than manipulation. Digital stories, especially, also allow for more diverse representation so more people can see themselves in the campaign.
As for the sales side, stories sell more. When consumers don’t have to choose a solution to their problem because a Marketer or Advertiser just mirrored the issue and solved it with an effective product or service, they already understand why the product will help. The consumer sees that it will make their life easier because someone else who had a similar experience used the solution to solve the same problem.
How to Learn the Graphic Design Tools
If you’re ready to begin learning the skills you need to be an effective Graphic Designer who excels at digital storytelling, there are many options to choose from.
Noble Desktop offers free introductory seminars for related topics such as graphic design, web design, and motion graphics. These courses will give you a feel for the industries and the software you’ll need to begin or pivot to a new career.
On the other hand, if you’re ready to dig in a little deeper, Noble has plenty of options for Graphic Design courses, including (but not limited to): Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. There are certificate options for both Graphic Design and Digital Design that include these softwares, as well. Within the Digital Design Certificate, there’s also a curriculum for web design framework and additional portfolio building work.
If you’re not quite sure about learning in a classroom, no problem. You can take the courses in-person or live online, which offers the benefits of being in a classroom with peers from the comfort of your own home or office.