Stories that Move Mountains: Storytelling and Visual Design for Persuasive Presentations

Learn From Our Experience

ITERATE Looking back at the visual stories we have been creating for the last decade, we have never got it right first time. Not once. Not even close. Sometimes it just takes a few days, sometimes months, of working with people, telling the stories, and iterating to get them right. There's a lot of testing to be done, a lot of listening to feedback from others, and iteration of your design.

Each of the sections of the Visual Story Map corresponds to a chapter in this book. At the end of each chapter, you will find a checklist of key things to remember and perform as you go through that part of the CAST process. All of the checklists are laid out the same way to allow you to find them quickly and jump from checklist to checklist to get a simple view of all of the steps. As you iterate over development of your visual story, keep going back to the checklists to help you stay on track.

INTEGRATE We created the CAST process and the Visual Story Map to provide a structure that we know works. One of the strengths is the integration of all the parts to develop a compelling story and visual design that together are focused on exactly what the audience needs to know. If you find yourself skipping a part of the process, or with content in one part of the Visual Story Map that is not integrated with the rest of your content, you should stop and work out what is missing.

In each of the chapters you will see the evolution of two example visual stories. These examples ...