Don’t make this mistake in visual storytelling
Visual storytelling shapes society in each new part of the world that you visit. The presence of visual stories in the format of design, writing or media has revolutionized the way that humans think and most importantly, act.
This umbrella term, visual storytelling represents virtually any story told with visual elements attached to it. The visuals can range from anything such as intricate hand-drawn sketches to photos to paragraphs of text on a page. The identity of it has shaped who I am today and the storyteller that I hope to grow as throughout my career.
Visuals have the unique power of quickly grabbing the attention of passing viewers or readers and enhancing the pre-existing elements of a story. I believe designers tell grand stories with their logo designs, website designs, video animations, typography and of course sketches and paintings. Each design represents an important part of the purpose behind it and tells a story of even the artist behind it as well. Similarly to designers, journalists also play a monstrous role in the creation of visual stories. Journalists use visuals primarily to grab attention and evoke emotion from viewers, a small element that has revolutionized the media industry. The difference between reading a newspaper and seeing a story on television is monumental when comparing the number of people who have moved away from newspapers. Most people have resorted to TV or social media to get their news, and thrown away the old newspaper for its lack of exciting visual story elements. Therefore, visual elements are not only an improvement in storytelling, they are also the future.
However, with visuals comes certain guidelines to ensure that the stories are told ethically.
The “deadly sins of visual storytelling”
This is a phrase I hadn’t heard of before expanding my research. As an aspiring reporter, I’m well aware of the wrong-doings in journalism ethics. These include anything from spreading false or unconfirmed information to using a misleading feature image on the top of a web story. While there are several mistakes that journalists or visual storytellers can make, there should never be a scenario when any of them are deemed okay. Throughout my research, the one that stuck out as most alarming to me was misleading statistics. These are categorized as visual because of the way you can display statistics in the form of diagrams or charts.
SOURCE: Americans United for Life
At first glance, this graph appears to show that the number of abortions are increasing and the number of cancer screenings and prevention services are decreasing. The chart indicates that 327,000 abortions are greater in inherent value than 935,573 cancer screenings and prevention services. With this, the organization seeks to convey a shift in focus from cancer screenings to abortions. However, after further evaluation, investigators discovered that there was no justification for comparing these two numbers because there was relatively no y-axis. When corrected, this is what the graph should’ve looked like:
SOURCE: Data Pine
This completely changes the way the reader feels when seeing this information because it displays an entirely different concept. Distorting information to make it seem like certain trends are happening, when they are not is a form of misinformation and is highly looked down upon. I believe that society is already confused about which information they should believe and not believe, having organizations carelessly visualize their data is only adding to the problem. Since this form of visual storytelling presents data, rather than just an image, I believe it has a stronger effect on society.