A Narrative Method for Creativity, How Colour Theory Works, and the Best Political Poster...EVER!

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10 stories we've enjoyed this week

Illustration by Soofiya – Work with Soofiya

Hi All,
Just one thing from us this week. We've been helping the Jacobs Foundation on season two of their podcast Teachers' Voices. In each episode, host Nina Alonso has inspiring conversations with international experts on learning and child development. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Throughout the season, teachers and researchers will be sharing the tools and resources they couldn't live without. If you work in education or research, share your tools with the Teachers' Voices team on Twitter.

That's enough from me. Enjoy this week's stories and have a great weekend.
Hugh

The Short Story

How Chicago's House Ball Community Increased Vaccination Rates
(Comic)

A Narrative Method For Creativity Training
(4 min read)

Adam Westbrook: The Best Filmmaking Technique I Know
(4 min read)

What Using Red and Yellow Does to Your Customer's Brains
(5 min read)

Building a Small Community For Sharing Ideas
(5 min read)

Anatomy of a Product Placement
(6 min read)

How Do You Measure Creativity
(Report)

The Best Political Campaign Poster...EVER!
(5 min read)

You Can Analyse Comedy Afterall
(6 min read)

Graphic Design Has Rules...
(Tweet)

Two images from a comic telling the story of how the LGBTQ House Ball community in Chicago helped encourage vaccination. In one panel, Palm Cards feature ball icons who have been vacinated. In the other, a picture of people in the queue to go to a ball. The image tells of how a place in the queue was used as an incentive for people to get vaccinated.

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and content company based in Brighton and London. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas.

Here's 3 reasons to get in touch.

1. You want to talk to us about content production: podcasts, videos, animations, illustrations, editorial.

2. You want to talk to us about content strategy or format development.

3. You want to create a brand or an identity that makes it easier to communicate your message.

We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch.

The Full Story

How Chicago's House Ball Community Increased Vaccination Rates
A comic journalist tells the story of how the Chicago House Ball community worked together to increase vaccination rates amongst Black LGBTQ members. Comics are a great tool for telling complex stories. In 2020 we made these comics about the near future for Nesta.
(Comic)

A Narrative Method For Creativity Training
Researchers have proposed a new method for developing creative ideas using storytelling. The narrative method asks participants to generate stories based on hypothetical situations or think from someone else’s perspective. For instance, marketers might be asked to imagine a world in which their competitor’s product was free and to describe how they would respond, or they might learn a little about how a co-worker thinks and then imagine how they would solve a specific problem.
(4 min read)

Adam Westbrook: The Best Filmmaking Technique I Know
Adam Westbrook is a filmmaker, journalist, and artist. He makes films for the New York Times, two of which have been nominated for Emmys. In this excellent post, he looks at a technique used by Hitchcock to visualise the invisible in a creative way. I really enjoy Adam's Sunday newsletters and recommend you subscribe if you like this sort of thing.
(4 min read)

What Using Red and Yellow Does to Your Customer's Brains
In this short piece, the team at 99% Invisible takes a look at colour theory, colour in advertising, and colour in propaganda. For poster fans, within the piece is a really interesting video on the evolution of the political poster and narrative art in political campaigns.
(5 min read)

Building a Small Community For Sharing Ideas
I've been thinking about this a lot recently. During lockdown, software engineer James Mullholland was thinking about forming a community for sharing creative ideas – somewhere between a club and a loosely defined set of friends. This early planning yielded an interesting insight into how many people is right for such a group. The answer, it turns out, is twelve: "Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up."
(5 min read)

Anatomy of a Product Placement
As more people skip ads and choose streaming TV services, ads are finding it harder to reach eyeballs. It's not surprising that more products are appearing in our favourite shows. The New York Times breaks down how product placement works, how writers are having to write products into storylines, and how AI is being used to drop different products into the same show for viewers in different locations.
(6 min read)

How Do You Measure Creativity
How do creative studios view and define successful client-agency relationships, creative attributes, and social impact? A new study from creative consultancy Aufi attempts to answer this and other questions. With regards to successful client-agency relationships, Respect and Chemistry score higher than Creative Freedom, which really resonates with me and my experiences with Storythings. I quite like the design of this report, too. (Via It's Nice That)
(Report)

The Best Political Campaign Poster...EVER!
In 1972 Shirley Chisolm became the first Black woman to run for president. Forget Obama's Shepard Fairey 'Hope' poster. This is a far better poster and slogan.
(5 min read)

You Can Analyse Comedy Afterall
Like music, they say you can't analyse comedy. Try telling that to comedy writer Joel Morris who has just done so in his book Comedy Basics. Click on the 'about the book' section of this Unbound page to read an extract in which he analyses the idea that you can't analyse comedy. Oh yes. Then order the book. It'll be very good. Joel spoke at our event, The Story, in 2019.
(6 min read)

Graphic Design Has Rules...
And they work.
(Tweet)

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend you can subscribe here and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for reading and see you all next week,

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the team at Storythings

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A Narrative Method for Creativity, How Colour Theory Works, and the Best Political Poster...EVER!

10 stories we've enjoyed this week

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