How to Use Visual Encasements to Brighten Up Your Stories
Hello friend,
How are you? I hope you’re in a festive mood celebrating the spring holidays with family and friends.
Holidays are great times to curate experiences that connect people through shared social experiences - bound by time, place, food and customs - reliving memorable stories from our past.
This process of curating distinct experiences during the holidays is also quite handy when you’re looking to curate your own visual stories for your brand.
First things first
No surprise here, before curating any visuals, you first need to define the purpose of the story you want to tell.
What’s your “sweet spot” that will be valuable both to your customer and your business goals?
And lastly, what do you want your audience to feel, think and do after seeing your story?
With this intelligence, you can brainstorm with your team about a relatable story to tell and then figure out the visual format and publishing platforms to tell it on.
Let’s talk about visual encasements
You probably won’t find anywhere the term “Visual Encasements.” Ha! I just made it up to define a simple visualization practice that may be quite useful to you.
To do it right you want to think like an art curator that is looking for the optimal way to present artworks in a given space - your visual story in our context.
What should be the focal point or protagonist? What is the visual metaphor? What should be the winding journey? What is the key message? And more.
Let’s use images and videos as they represent the common visual formats you constantly use on social to spread your brand narrative.
One way to do it is to find a form of unrelated element that’s visually shaped around the meaning of your brand’s function.
Like your favorite filled dumpling or empanada, when you encase your branded content inside a familiar container, you get a surprising visual synergy.
You can see a bunch of examples in my story What Happens when Form Meets Function?
Common types of visual encasements
You have several ways you can do this, I’ll share two:
1. Spaces
For my monthly workshop promotion I used the visual below that features a gallery space for a couple of reasons:
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