Webinar Recording: Visual Storytelling for Business Concepts
Community Webinar hosted on August 5th, 2024
Last Monday, we hosted the third Design Mavericks Community Webinar. As with all our previous webinars, I crowdsourced ideas for relevant topics from the community. This time, we focused on visual storytelling for business concepts—a topic very dear to me and often underestimated. Design leaders tend to delegate visual communication to more junior members of staff, considering it a less strategic activity. However, I believe that visual storytelling is one of the superpowers of design and designers. It has the potential to strategically support design leaders in winning the hearts and minds of difficult stakeholders, and it does require all the strategic thinking the team has to offer!
Given its importance, I chose this topic for the August webinar and invited Giovanni Ruello, an expert illustrator and service design lead, as our guest speaker. Giovanni currently works for Bosch and is also the co-founder of the "Drawing Gym" and the "30 Days Drawing Challenge."
Giovanni delivered an excellent presentation and a series of easy, inspiring exercises to help us hone our drawing skills while reflecting on what makes a good and effective visual within a business context. My key takeaways from the discussion:
The visualisation is as good as the conversation it inspires.
There is a necessity (and an opportunity) to connect design artefacts to the reality of the organisation.
Finding the right metaphor is crucial to simplifying complex concepts or making abstract ones accessible to a diverse audience.
Start small and incorporate visuals into your presentations to see how others react.
Unfortunately his wifi was unexpectedly poor during the webinar so although participants could follow and engage in the conversation, I didn’t think it would be a good experience for those who couldn’t attend the session to watch the resulting recording. Therefore, for those paying members who could not attend the session, Giovanni recorded a dedicated video in which he goes through the same presentation he shared during the webinar. If you are a paying member, you’ll be able to find a link to the video at the end of this post, together with his slide deck. I know I will use many of those images and ideas in the future!
Giovanni would love to connect with you all and answer any questions or reflections you might have. So, do connect with him on LinkedIn.
Thank you to all the members who took the time to engage in the discussion! The next webinar will run in two months. You will be notified in the next few weeks about the date, topic, and new guest speaker.
Have a marvellous summer weekend, folks.
Marzia