There's nothing like visuals to show customer pain

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February 9, 2010

When it comes to showing what makes you different from the competition, bullet points aren't very compelling.

InstantCard, an online producer of photo IDs, chose to illustrate their customers' pain, and how it can be cured, with visuals.

The hassles and the solution were fun to illustrate. This video required the depiction of multiple characters, various emotions, transcontinental exchanges and both online and physical products. This is a good example of how visuals can communicate a fairly complex message simply, in under two minutes.

(Click here to view video)

New training video for Total

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November 11, 2009

The French oil company Total recently ordered a Visual Explainer video for their in-house training sessions on phone answering skills. The video was produced in English and in French. To view both videos, click here.

New video: Visual Explainer, to go!

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October 13, 2009

A new video has been posted. It shows how visual explanations can be downloaded to portable devices for on-the-go explanations.

There are two versions of the clip, with and without a music background.


Which do you prefer? Leave a message in the contact section to let us know!

New screencast video: How to resize digital photos

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July 23, 2009

A new video in the series on emailing digital photos is now available.

Part 1 focused on why you should resize photos, and this new part 2 shows how to do this using standard Windows tools.

For how-to videos about software applications, a screencast (filming the activity on a computer screen) is the most effective teaching tool. Adding illustrated explanations to the screencast can serve to highlight certain concepts and to make the demo more entertaining.

You can read more about the video here.

Delivering effective explanations is a critical leadership skill

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June 26, 2009

A recent article by leadership consultant John Baldoni presented effective explanation as an essential leadership skill. Quoting a former Bill Clinton aide, he referred to President Obama as "the Great Explainer."

According to Baldoni, Franklin Roosevelt was another leader who mastered the power of explanation when he compared the Lend Lease program of aid to Britain to "lending a garden hose to a neighbor trying to put out a house fire."
(Great metaphor!)

Another quote from the article:

"What does it mean and why are we doing it are critical questions that every leader must answer with straightforward explanations."

Motivating crowds who understand must certainly be easier than motivating crowds who don't. Perhaps leaders should look into explanatory video as a tool to give people "a reason for action."

Metaphors as visual tools

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May 19, 2009

Illustrations rely heavily on metaphors. How do you depict something intangible? When a client needed to illustrate the different stages of a software development project, we chose a toaster to carry the message.

This had two benefits. First, a toaster is easier to draw than software! Second, the whimsical representation of the product gave us a chance to make the illustrations more playful, and hopefully more fun to look at. The appeal to the viewer's imagination increases the likelihood the message will leave an impression.

View the full set of illustrations here.