Visual Storytelling: The Details of Good Design

To us, visual storytelling encompasses all of the specific details we use to pull together a visual piece.

From stop motion, to copywriting, to determining length of sizzle reels, to animation styles. It's the nitty gritty in-between the larger picture. And we LOVE the details of this category.

On this page we'll share articles from our team on how we capture the essence of visual storytelling.

The Power of Visual Identity: More Than Meets the Eye

Visual identity is one of the most crucial aspects of building a strong brand. Let’s face it: in the world of branding, appearances matter. While we do believe it’s what’s on the inside that counts most, your outward appearances play a crucial role in making first impressions, establishing credibility, and attracting the right audience.

Consider the idiom “You can’t judge a book by its cover.” While there is truth to this, you can learn a lot about a book just with a quick glance. Within seconds of looking at the front of the book, you can answer a lot of different question: Is it for kids or adults? Is it a captivating political thriller or a reassuring guide designed to help boost your mindfulness? Does this book look like it belongs in the bargain bin or a best-selling list?

Through a combination of typography, colors, graphic design, and other context clues, you can intuit a lot about a book just through its cover, including if you will buy the book.

Guess what: People do the same thing with your brand.

Just like a well-crafted mission statement can inspire and guide a company, a strong visual identity can make a lasting impression on your audience. In today's increasingly visual world, a cohesive and consistent visual identity is crucial for establishing your brand's presence, personality, and purpose.

In this blog post, we'll dive into the world of visual identity and explore why it's an essential aspect of branding. We'll also examine the main components, the role of...

How AI Inspired Elevation to Create the 2023 Promax Awards Opening Sequence

This week, the 2023 Promax North & Latin America Awards celebrated innovation, creativity, and achievement in the region’s entertainment marketing industry. This event is one of the five ceremonies that Promax will host this year around the globe. The graphics packages for all of these awards shows, including the 90-second animated intro, was designed and produced by our team at Elevation. Creating this piece celebrating our peers around the world - a group that we know has high expectations - was equally exciting and daunting.

Part of that mix of emotions had to do with our long-standing relationship with Promax. Our team attended our first PromaxBDA conference many years ago, and we instantly knew it was an organization we wanted to be involved with. Promax provided an opportunity to connect with the community, meet up with clients, and be part of the design environment of peers. Our Artistic Director Dianne Frisbee recalls the excitement from her first conference, “It was such a thrilling experience to be able to see amazing work and hear directly from the creators. We quickly decided it was a community we wanted to be part of and to support.”

Promax has meant a lot to our team, so when they approached us with the opportunity to collaborate with them on the design for their 2023 awards shows, we were both extremely eager and a bit trepidatious. We are a small tight-knit team, and the chance to both celebrate great design and creative thought in our field as well as...

5 Influential Typographers of the Last Century | People & Artifacts

This moment wouldn’t be possible right now without typography. Sure, print media lead to the advancement of humankind through technology, the arts, and the mass spread of knowledge. But I’m specifically talking about something far more important. This exact moment that you are experiencing right now — reading the words I have written — wouldn’t be possible.You probably learned about the invention of the printing press in school. But you probably learned less about the invention of the font. Which is equally as important, if you think about it. Without fonts, it would just be a press with nothing to print. The very first font, Blackletter, was designed to mimic handwriting. But fonts have evolved through experimentation and creativity.Each societal breakthrough in technology has coincided with the creation of typefaces. The Industrial Revolution saw a flood of new fonts. The computer boom of the late 20th century also saw inventive fonts arrive on our digital screens. Welcome to the world, Comic Sans.As we are in the midst of a new technological revolution that puts more of an emphasis on virtual 3D spaces, it felt appropriate to dedicate this edition of People and Artifacts - A Design Deep Dive to the five most influential designers of typography from the last century.But before we dive in, consider what makes for a great typeface. When we learn our ABCs as a child, we take for granted that an A looks like an A and a Z looks like a Z. The art of typography is all about...

The dawn of great AI image creation is here. What does it mean for the future of design?

When I saw the early tests for AI image generation using text prompts, I was both excited and underwhelmed. These early experiments generated very low-res, mainly fuzzy shapes and blobs of color that could be just about anything if you squint hard enough. But, just a few years later, those fuzzy blobs began to take true form.

It was early 2021, when OpenAI’s DALL•E text-to-image generator was announced. OpenAI first made waves with an impressive natural language text generator called GPT-3. That tool generates text so convincing, it’s hard to tell it apart from human-generated content. Case in point, GPT-3 wrote the end of that last sentence for me. The team at OpenAI used a modified version of the GPT model to explore image creation in what would become DALL•E. And, very much like GPT-3, news of DALL•E turned a lot of heads. The results of some of OpenAI’s prompts, although admittedly cherry-picked, were beyond anything I could’ve imagined to that point. You might’ve seen a group of images depicting an “armchair in the shape of an avocado” that quickly went viral, not just because the images looked like real photos, but because there were dozens of unique avocado shaped chair designs that didn’t even exist in the real world.

The idea of creating convincing images with basic text inputs was quite compelling, especially for those of us whose jobs revolve around constant creative output. Immediate use cases came to mind for storyboarding and scene building. The problem?...

6 Designers Who Changed Magazines Forever | People & Artifacts

Magazines are one of the most influential mediums in design. Since the publication of thefirst magazineErbauliche Monaths Unterredungenin 1663, magazines have informed, influenced, and entertained the public, all on a regular basis. Magazines are known by many names — circulars, periodicals, and even rags. This is the platform of renegades and anti-establishment. But art with underground roots tends to make its way into the mainstream.

Magazines don’t just cover fashion. Magazines are fashion.

We are currently in a moment of constantly changing and evolving mediums. Just as the dust settles on one digital revolution, another radical change is on the horizon with Web3 and the metaverse. To get a clue about where design is going, we’re taking a look back withPeople & Artifacts - A Design Deep Dive. This series will look at the history of design through the lens of the most influential artists and transformative mediums.

As a medium for the masses, magazines drive and shape popular opinion and tastes.

Roger Clark, Spectrum News 1, speculates that a flattering depiction of candidate Abraham Lincoln on the cover of the November 1860 Harper’s Weekly Magazine is believed to have helped him win the election. One current example of the massive influence of magazines is Apple’s redesign of iPhone lock screens for iOS 16. Apple is using machine learning technology to make it simple for anyone to transform their pictures into a magazine-style cover, complete with a subject...

Style Over Realism: The Latest 3D Animation Trend

We are on the other side of the uncanny valley.

When 3D animation first arrived, artists and studios raced towards photorealism. For a long time, many would judge advancements in 3D technology on how real it looked. From video game cutscenes to the latest blockbusters, progress toward 3D realism popped its head up to show off its newly rendered face. As computer processors and 3D software got more advanced, better lighting, cleaner modeling, and more detailed texturing became the standard. Even in the cartoonish world of Pixar and Dreamworks, the caricatured models are textured with life-like surfaces. I still look back at the bread in Ratatouille with amazement.

At some point, we were told, "it's here!" But as we looked upon the newest face of photorealism, something wasn't quite right. The absorption of light into the surface, the pores on the face, the liquid in the corner of the eyes, the peach fuzz, it was all there. Our reaction?

What's wrong with that dude's face?

Why style is starting to beat realism in 3D animation

Turns out a couple decades of R&D isn't enough to fool millions of years of evolution. We'd officially entered the uncanny valley, a name coined to describe the scenario above where life-like 3D renders still register to us as fake.

Today, the march goes on. While realistic 3D will always have its uses and appeal, there has been a mainstream effort recently to break free of it. Creating a unique look for 3D is nothing new, but it was limited to...

5 Fonts Every Designer Needs to Know

I love fonts. Currently, Font Book on my Mac says that I have 1,419 fonts on my computer. And that doesn’t even count what I have installed with Adobe Cloud. To say that I have a passion for fonts might be an understatement.

So asking a font enthusiast to pick their favorite fonts is like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. …If they had thousands of children.

As a designer, fonts are an essential tool for telling your brand’s story. “Everything communicates,” like the saying goes, and that especially applies to the fonts a brand chooses to use for anything they put out into the world. When picking a font, I not only consider how it looks, but also its history, its origin, and its unique cultural, social, and even economic driving forces. Every font has a distinct personality.

As tough as it is to narrow down, here are five fonts that I consider essential to know. Some of these are very popular, which means that they get overused, resulting in backlash and strong opinions. However, I still identify these as unique and beautiful, as well as having substantial impact on Graphic Design.

I’m going to dive deep into the history, personality, and unique impact each of these fonts have, drawing on my experience as an Art Director.

1) Helvetica

Helvetica was based off an 1896 font called Standard in the US and Akzidenz-Grotesk in Germany. The sans-serif typeface was an avant-garde font of the 1920’s International Style that emerged at that time as a modern...

How to Take Your Style to the Next Level

Ok. So you’ve come to a realization. Your design could be better. Maybe you’re working on a brand refresh or you're starting something from scratch, but nevertheless, that truth has just hit you like a ton of bricks. Hey, it’s okay. It happens. Every creative can relate. We expect the best, freshest ideas from ourselves, and sometimes that doesn’t come right away. Don’t let it get you down, friend. Instead, consider this an opportunity to breathe some fresh life into your work. Let’s take a look at some key ingredients that will elevate your designs to something remarkable.

Who We Are, Who We Are Talking to, And Why it Matters

The most crucial first step in creating a design that’s impactul starts before you ever even open an Adobe program, and that’s making sure you really know who your brand is. Skip this, and expect instant failure. Why? Because if you don’t understand who your brand is, no one else will either. You’ve got to lock down a simple, solid brand identity before you head any further. Seems like a simple task. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t. To help figure it out, ask yourself a few questions. What’s unique about your brand in this category? Why would someone pick yours over a different one? If you had to distill your brand into one word, what would it be? Just a few to consider.

You’ll also want to make sure you know who your target is. Are they kids or adults? Mostly men or mostly women? What matters to them? What kind of things do they like that aren’t...

Wide Format and Beyond: Breaking Past 16x9 Video To Make a Big Impact

1,920 pixels wide. 1,080 pixels tall. If you work with video, there’s a comfort to seeing those dimensions. Whether you call it 1920x1080, 1080p, or just HD video, this format has dominated our digital lives for well over a decade. Driven by the popularity of HDTVs, the aspect ratio of 16x9 has become the default standard for video, both on traditional broadcast and online. Even as resolution on TV sets have evolved from 720p all the way up to 4k UHD, the 16x9 aspect ratio (or the relationship between the height and the width of a frame) has stayed the same. By now, 16x9 is classic.

And sometimes, classic can mean boring. Don’t get me wrong. 16x9 is great when appropriate, which is most of the time. But there are definitely cases where you want to think outside the rectangle and consider creating your content in formats other than 16x9. Whether you are running an in-person expo, a hybrid event, or a marketing campaign, here are ways you can implement non-standard format video to enhance whatever your brand is doing.

Epic Events

People attend events for many different reasons: to learn something, to meet someone, or to feel something (hopefully excitement). Companies and brands hold events to deliver these experiences to their most ardent fans, their most loyal customers, and/or leaders of their industry. Utilizing non-standard format video can help deliver a memorable event and further your organization’s goals.

For Keynote Presentations: For upfronts and conferences,...

Evergreen Design Trends

Trends have been coming and going since the beginning of time. From bell bottom jeans to skinny eyebrows – But what makes something “trendy” and why do some trends tend to stick around longer than others? Why are some trends a blip in time when others are evergreen?

In this blog post we will be discussing what design trends are and why you should care about them.

What Is a Design Trend?

Let’s start out by defining exactly what a trend is: a general direction in which something is developing or changing/ a current style or preference. A trend can derive from random luck because a certain style blew up on social media, advertisements, or another form of art. They can also derive from a specific spike in what clients are seeking out.

Design trends can be, and usually are, heavily influenced by current events and the general public’s current climate. In other words, trends are really great at reading the room. Some trend titles you may recognize are minimalism, responsive design, and vintage.

What Makes a Design Trend Successful

Successful design trends usually build off of basic design principles. Trends commonly build off of something that was already there to catch a viewer's eye in a different but still familiar way. As stated before, trends don’t just come out of thin air, they change as the market changes. For example, when tracing the start of minimalism in technology products, it was Apple’s simple and sleek designs that catapulted this trend.

If a trend is popular...

Elevation Glossary of Creative Terms

The creative industry is loaded with acronyms, sayings, phrases, and words that can seem a bit confusing if you're not familiar with them. We thought it'd be helpful to our fellow creatives if we compiled those terms into one place. We'll be consistently updating this post as we think of things to add.

2D animation

A 2D animation is comprised of only height and width, meaning the characters of the animation are only 2 dimensional.

Here is a project we completed for Shiseido Americas that is comprised of 2D animation using iconography, typography, and seamless transitions to tell the story of their sustainability efforts as a company.

3D animation

In 3D animation, characters are made up of height, width, and depth, which creates a more realistic contrast compared to 2D animation.

360 campaign

The term "360 campaign" has become somewhat of a buzzword in our industry. To us a 360 campaign is a creative concept that spans the gamut of...

The Strategy of Style

To paraphrase Charles Bukowski, “Style is everything.” It is the non-verbal clues that tell others about yourself. Even if you don’t think you have a style, your non-style is communicating on your behalf. Every choice is deliberate. Colors and shapes evoke common emotional responses within a culture. For example, blue, the color of the sky and sea, is calming and is frequently associated with depth, stability, sincerity and trust. This is why we see debate stages dominated by the color blue. Whereas yellow, the color of the sun is most often associated with feelings of happiness or friendliness.

Know Your Brand

Designing a logo and full brand identity are a little like creating a dating profile. Your logo is that first impression that will introduce your company to potential customers. It is important to write down and define a clear brand identity. This should include what makes your brand unique and what beliefs and values are important. Think about what three words you want your customers to use to describe you and use these to craft your brand’s core personality.

Also check out our article on 'Elements of a brand' (Rebrand vs. Brand Refresh) – we break down how to develop what we call your "brand core".

Design: Your Visual Decoder Ring

It is time to start translating your brand into visuals. All design choices will be measured against the brand’s personality, and there are lots of elements to curate. Typography, colors, shapes, line styles, and textures, all add up...

6 Storytelling Strategies from a Screenwriter

Storytelling has become a trend. With books like Storynomics, Stories That Stick, and Building A Story Brand topping best sellers lists, story is one of the biggest buzzwords in advertising and marketing. And, to me, it’s a little baffling.

Not that I don’t think storytelling is important. Quite the opposite. As someone who grew up writing screenplays on spec in grade school before I even knew what “on spec” meant, storytelling has been a vital part of my life. In high school, I would routinely convince my teachers to let me make a short film in lieu of an essay. I spent my days at the University of Southern California studying different kinds of storytelling throughout theatre and film. Storytelling has been an obsession and a calling.

As a screenwriter, seeing story as a marketing trend baffles me just because it’s something so ingrained in how humans behave. In the days of hunters and gatherers, storytelling was integral to our survival. It’s in our DNA. People retain information much better if it’s conveyed in a story. That’s why you might struggle to remember what you ate for lunch last Thursday, but you can vividly recall a scene from a movie you haven’t seen in years.

Calling story a trend is like calling breathing or eating the next big thing. Storytelling has always been a trend, and story has always been important to advertising. The trendy part of the trend is that the advertising world is recognizing how tools that screenwriters and storytellers use to...