Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language [Hardcover]

R. Klanten (Author), S. Ehmann (Author), F. Schulze (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2011

A new visual language that is both informative and entertaining is emerging at the nexus of information graphics, illustration, and tactile design. More and more data is being collected. We can access ever more information at any time and from any place. The fundamental challenge now is how to extract the most valuable news, the most surprising findings, and the most relevant stories from the flood of information that is available to us. A new generation of designers, illustrators, and data journalists is addressing this challenge head on. They are developing a variety of new visual forms to depict information that can be classified as visual storytelling. The main idea behind visual storytelling is to take familiar image contexts and use them in a new way. By penetrating meaning and creating associations, abstract correlations can be visualized in a manner that is both easy to understand and aesthetically innovative. Today, visual storytelling is being used intensively in newspapers, magazines, websites, advertising, business reports, and museums. With its collection of inspiring, insightful, interactive, and entertaining examples, the book Visual Storytelling reveals how the contextualization of information is pushing the envelope of today's design and aesthetics.

Editorial Reviews

From the Inside Flap

A new visual language that is both informative and entertaining is emerging at the nexus of information graphics, illustration, and tactile design

Product Details

• Hardcover: 256 pages
• Publisher: Gestalten (September 28, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 3899553756
• ISBN-13: 978-3899553758
• Product Dimensions: 12 x 9.8 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #23,545 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars diverse ways for representing facets of the vast amount of information in today's world, November 20, 2011

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Visual Storytelling: Inspiring a New Visual Language (Hardcover)

Graphic arts are keeping up with the overflow of information coming out of the Internet and other media. The growth and interconnectivity of the media, the complexity of the world, and the pace of change have all lead to a tremendous volume of information. Andrew Losowsky closes his Introduction on the note, "Visual storytelling is increasingly becoming the most effective way of finding order among the chaos."

Such storytelling is not like narrative--of graphic novels or a journalistic event, for example--but rather arrangement of the information making use of and often going much beyond the graphic techniques of bold imagery, bright colors, and linkages seen in the areas of graphic comics and graphics in journalism. As Losowsky also notes in his Introduction, this visual storytelling "gives us the tools to process, to look and to learn. Only then can we try to understand. The visual storytelling as exemplified in this volume is for comprehension of a body of information, not for popular entertainment as in the graphic novels or representation of an event or story as in journalism.

The hundreds of visual storytelling examples over every page are basically two kinds: a graphic image condensing multiple data or parts of a particular subject, or a grouping of condensations graphically representing the connections and sometimes the development of a matter or topic. Either main type can be equally complex, and the general artistic appearance is collage. Take away the text, and what remains would be collage of shapes, varying dimensions, and stresses. But with this visual storytelling of interest to marketers, academics such as sociologists, researchers, government planners, economists, demographers, pollsters, and such, the text is necessary. For the text not only identifies and defines the subject or interest in the ocean of contemporary information, but also gives a starting point for reading the visual images or pattern or commenting on these.

In the first section, eight leading visual storytellers discuss their ideas and work in question-and-answer formats with accompanying samples of projects. The second section--Part B, Visual Stories--catalogs diverse outstanding works in the areas of Breaking News, Science, Geography, The Modern World, and Sports for abundant additional samples for study. The diverse content spans contemporary interests from commercial art to academic, scholarly studies. The collected works reflect not only the vast amount of information in today's world, but also desirable and optimum ways for representing facets of the information so that it can be comprehended, relevant, insightful, and useful.