A collection of best practices, research and interviews that creators can consider when building interactive narratives.

Insights

Using illustration in journalism: process, context and tools.

Illustration in Journalism

Interview answers on the definition of narrative.

What is Narrative, Anyway?

The Nieman Program on Narrative Journalism currently has five major activities: the Nieman Narrative Digest, organizing the 1,000-journalist Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism

Nieman Program On Narrative Journalism

Martinis, pyramids and hourglasses for storytelling.

Structuring visual narratives to feed the curiosity

DensityDesign is a research lab at the Design Department in Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Our research revolves around information visualisation, tackling the design challenges arising from the visual representation of social and cultural phenomena.

Density Design Lab

On Graphonyms: the Importance of Chart Type Names

Understanding context and audience to balance linear and interactive storytelling.

Storydoing and storytelling

An exercise in building a data visualization with ChatGPT writing—and debugging!—the code

Making a Data Visualization With No Coding Skills Using ChatGPT

An inside look at the creative processes for interactive storytelling at the Pudding.

Behind the Scenes at The Pudding: Creative Processes

Data visualisation helps us to understand the world. It also has the power to change it. Narrated by Adam Rutherford.

Five charts that changed the world - BBC Ideas

An introduction to Google’s new data visualization guidelines

Six Principles for Designing Any Chart

Tapestry 2017 Short Story Presentation #3 by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic

Where's Larry? bringing data to life through story

The word “stories” has become synonymous with visualizing and presenting data. But contrar...

Once Upon a Time: From Data to Stories

How to plan or adapt a scrollytelling story for mobile.

Responsive scrollytelling best practices

We discuss Marco's approach to producing impactful and unique visual stories as well as his definition of success.

Buried Signals

Identifying Visual Potential

When depicting complex systems, it is not enough for our visualizations to be only beautiful and comprehensive. A good exposition builds up to complex ideas by leading its audience through its constituent parts. Animations in data visualizations, with careful pacing and thoughtful transitions, allow us to show how different parts of a system come together. In this talk, Tony will present how he applied these ideas in his work in the R2D3 project, as well as other examples of this style of exposition.

Animation, Pacing, and Exposition

Our interview with Pei Ying, Head and co-founder of Kontinentalist, about their processes and creative approach.

Data Stories - Interview of Pei Ying Loh

An extreme distillation of many studies done over graphical perception.

Kennedy Elliot

39 studies about human perception in 30 minutes

Human perception plays an important role in the area of visualization. An understanding of perception can significantly improve both the quality and the quantity of information being displayed

North Carolina State University

Perception in Visualization

The Laws of Simplicity is a 100-page book I wrote just as the Apple iPod was starting to take off and while I was earning my MBA as a kind of hobby

John Maeda

Laws of Simplicity

In this interview with Pablo, a visual journalist at the New York Times, we discuss the importance of physical immersion to gather more personal information and create unique angles in visual storytelling.

Pablo Robles: Immersive Visual Reporting

Sophisticated data visualizations are pushing the bounds of what we can process, sometimes to the breaking point. What are the signature styles of contemporary data vis, and will they stand the test of time?

Taking Data Visualization From Eye Candy to Efficiency

The visualization you use to explore and display that data changes depending on what you’re after and data types. This is a guide to help you figure out what type of visualization to use to see that stuff.

11 Ways to Visualize Changes Over Time – A Guide

In this interview with Theresa, the Guardian's Head of Visuals, we explore visual storytelling insights from the graphics team's work over the years. 

Theresa Malone: Graphics Team Insights

Storytelling is shown as an effective approach to humanize information perception.
However, its potential to build a biased view of the information contents is often
neglected. Moreover, narrative understanding and emotion may interfere with data
visualization comprehension.

Artigo

Storytelling in data visualization: information bias

Throughout history, storytelling has been an effective way of conveying information and knowledge. In the
field of visualization, storytelling is rapidly gaining momentum and evolving cutting-edge techniques that

enhance understanding.

Storytelling and Visualization: A Survey

Seven years ago I started working full time at the Guardian in the glamorous role of SEO editorial executive. For five of those years I’ve spent every working moment plugged into the richest realtime data source of any news organisation in the world

Chris Moran

What I learned from seven years as the Guardian’s audience editor

How do media leaders view the year ahead?

Reuters Institute

Journalism, media, and technology trends and predictions 2023

Want to make high-quality 3D stories for readers without the latest devices and slower connections? We open-sourced the 
@glTF3D
 bundler plugins we built to optimize 3D assets.

https://rd.nytimes.com/projects/optimizing-3d-gltf-assets-for-interactive-journalism

Optimizing 3D glTF Assets for Interactive Journalism

Effective data communication often requires allowing users to explore the data and draw their own conclusions while also providing structured guidance and interpretation.

Explanatory and Exploratory Information Visualization

‘Social Mobility in the Digital Age’ is the culmination of a year-long research project by Paris-based insights agency, L’Atelier BNP Paribas.

Gladeye

Social Mobility in the Digital Age: A Two-Part Case Study

R&D used reference photos and videos of the venue, photos of the play, and player models created using a machine learning model called ICON to recreate Pulisic’s goal in 3D.

New York Times

Modeling Key World Cup Moments with Machine Learning

The Pudding’s process to go from idea to data story

Continue, Pivot, or Put It Down

This is the third installment of a multi-part series designed to help you familiarize yourself with the tools used to make visual, data-driven essays.

Making Internet Things, Part 3: Storytelling

Our new research shows how popular chart choices can trigger unconscious social biases and reinforce systemic racism.

Nightingale

Unfair Comparisons: How Visualizing Social Inequality Can Make It Worse

When it comes to text-to-image technology, the future is now. But with it arrives a host of ethical and legal questions.

A news photo editor’s nightmare is an art director’s dream by 

Storytelling allows visualization to reveal information as effectively and intuitively as if the viewer were watching a movie.

Communications of the ACM

What Storytelling Can Do For Information Visualization

Stories are not only a good way to present data, they also work as a means of packaging information and
knowledge in a way that is easy to pick up by another person.

Data Plus Science

Storytelling: The Next Step for Visualization

Examining the design of interactive articles by synthesizing theory from disciplines such as education, journalism, and visualization.

Distill.pub

Communicating with Interactive Articles

Narrative visualizations combine conventions of communicative and exploratory information visualization to convey an intended story. We demonstrate visualization rhetoric as an analytical framework for understanding how design techniques that prioritize particular interpretations in visualizations that “tell a story” can significantly affect end-user interpretation.

Visualization Rhetoric: Framing Effects in Narrative Visualization

Many factors can shape the flow of visual data-driven stories, and thereby the way readers experience those stories. Through the analysis of 80 existing stories found on popular websites, we systematically investigate and identify seven characteristics of these stories, which we name “flow-factors,” and we illustrate how they feed into the broader concept of “visual narrative flow.

SCI UTAH

Visual Narrative Flow: Exploring Factors Shaping Data Visualization Story Reading Experiences

Victor is the cofounder of TARGO, a two-time Emmy-nominated virtual reality production studio. In this interview we talk about VR storytelling techniques, predictions for the industry and hardware improvements.

Victor Agulhon: Virtual Reality Journalism

The pain of having to know a set of skills that are far removed from the work of journalism, which always has a deadline. These are common hardships with building interactive stories, publishing and optimising so that it can be read by thousands on low-powered phones. Journalists can’t worry about these things. Idyll is about solving all of those problems.

Matt Conlen - Explorables and the Convergence of Storytelling

Many data stories in journalism do not have a story arc, but rather present facts without much structure. This mirrors the
popular inverted pyramid style of writing that presents the most important information up front, to be followed by evidence.
We have found a subset of stories that follow a more structured approach, however. These stories begin with a claim or question,
but do not immediately present that as the conclusion. Instead, they then present pieces of evidence that are only tied together,
and back to the initial claim, at the end.

Kosara Eurovis

An Argument Structure for Data Stories

Data visualization is regularly promoted for its ability to reveal stories within data, yet these “data stories” differ in important ways from traditional forms of storytelling. Storytellers, especially online journalists, have increasingly been integrating visualizations into their narratives, in some cases allowing the visualization to function in place of a written story. In this paper, we systematically review the design space of this emerging class of visualizations.

Stanford

Narrative Visualization: Telling Stories with Data

In this paper, Bret Victor suggests that the long-standing focus on “interaction” may be misguided. For a majority subset of software, called “information software,” I argue that interactivity is actually a curse for users and a crutch for designers, and users’ goals can be better satisfied through other means.

Worry Dream

Magic Ink: Information Software and the Graphical Interface

While some individual news media have clearly been very successful at building online reach or convincing people to subscribe, and developed new offers across podcast, video, and newsletters, this year’s data show many publishers are still struggling to come to terms with structural changes that have been ravaging the industry for more than a decade.

Insights

Illustration in Journalism

What is Narrative, Anyway?

Nieman Program On Narrative Journalism

Structuring visual narratives to feed th...

Density Design Lab

On Graphonyms: the Importance of Chart T...