My Lessons from the Trenches

Tips to enhance your visual strategy

Hi friend,

How are you? I hope you’re doing well.

How are you using visuals in your storytelling? What production tactics work for you?

Through my work with clients and sharing my insights on my media channels, including this newsletter, I have used a mixed visual strategy.

That means combining traditional handmade photos and sketches with stock, AI-generated images that I customize.

Here are vivid examples to illustrate this strategy, which you may find relevant to your approach:

Traditional Visualization

The core upside of all these techniques is that you have full control over the outcome. You’re not thrown into a rabbit hole of endless iterations when using AI chatbots.

You also feel a greater sense of ownership over the results.

The downside, of course, you’re limited to your creative expression capabilities.

1. Sketches

For a story I did about How Do You Software-Update Your Skills? I used a sketch app on my iPad and sketched the core idea.

Pretty crude, I know, but believable.

As you can see, the visual theme replicates the familiar “software update” radio waves icon used in various contexts - like smart TV, phone, or electric vehicle - and applies it to human learning.

To get a deeper view and learn from professional illustrators, check out:

• The backstory behind the great work Penny Raile did for my book design, Total Acuity

• My interview with NYTimes illustrator, Agnes Lee in How to Bring A Story to Life with Illustration?

2. Photos

For Tale of A Drowned Car story, I took this photo after coming across a real event of a drowned car and a crowd forming to see the process of the police getting the car out of the water.

The high authenticity value and the fact that this was a real event that carried practical visual storytelling tips - I think, make the step-by-step visual drama compelling.

As such, photos are great for documentary, product-in-context, customer stories, and much more.

3. Icons

If you browse my past stories here, you’ll see that I often use simple icons to convey the core message of a story.

Like in the story How About Some Human Touch?

I like this approach because of its minimalistic and clean design.

Since our eye is naturally drawn to look first at visuals before text, in one look, you get the gist.

4. Curated Infographic

For the story My Favorite Storytelling Formula, I mixed and matched individual icons I found on Canva to convey the essence of the False Start storytelling model.

The storyline takes you to destination X, but all of a sudden changes course, and you find yourself heading towards destination Y.

I enjoyed figuring out the visual analogy, which graphics would go where and how to control the main focus.

AI-Generated Visualization

If you started experimenting in AI as early as September 2022, when ChatGPT was first launched, I bet you also have a trail of old AI-generated images that illustrate the quality evolution of the medium.

5. Early Days

Back in 2016 I used the Prisma photo editing app to manipulate photos with various artistic effects using an early AI called "A Neural Algorithm of Artistic Style.”

visual_storytelling_institute

A post shared by @visual_storytelling_institute

For other early attempts, you can check out one of my first stories from September 18, 2022, covering What is an AI-Generated Image?

You’ll find there crude visuals I experimented with reflecting the nascent beginning.

6. Artwork-Inspired

For the story Poll: It's 2045, What Do You See?, I created this visual inspiration from Hieronymus Bosch's "The Garden of Earthly Delights" (1490-1510).

I figured it’s thematically aligned with the three future AI scenarios (realized with GPT 4o).

You gain immediate familiarity with this well-known artwork, but it’s reframed to achieve the story’s message.

Another fresh twist on this masterpiece, is bringing it to life with video and medieval music:

View Clip

@visualstorytell#visualstorytelling #brandstorytelling #hieronymusbosch #gardenofearthlydelights

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7. AI Material Substitution

Another popular trend of AI-generated visuals you can find on social networks is replacing the natural material an object is made of with unrelated and unexpected other materials.

This technique easily captures attention because it’s riding on the surprising effect of the Unlikely Combination principle.

For the story The Magic of Food Storytelling, I created the above image using the Grok app.

Unlike ChatGPT that spits out one image per ask, what I like about Grok is that for every prompt you ask it to visualize, you instantly get like about 50 iterations to choose from.

So, instead of going through millions of iterations one by one, on Grok if you’re lucky you can simply choose the right photo from the first large batch.

What visual strategy are you using these days? Feel free to share your experiences. Hey, we’re all learning here as we go ;)

See you next time!

Best,

- Shlomi

Shlomi Ron
Founder, Visual Storytelling Institute
shlomi@visualstorytell.com
story > visual > emotion > experience

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