Does Visual Storytelling Play by Different Rules?

A few more thoughts on Businessweek's cover debacle and visual storytelling written for Edelman.com... 

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Businessweek's Racist Visual Storytelling

Businessweek has produced some excellent cover designs, but they are rightfully being pilloried right now for this current cover that is so over the top, misguided and overtly racist that I hardly know where to begin.

The thing that most strikes me about the cover is that the visual story the cover tells is is one that could never in this day and age be written with words inside the magazine.

A little context: The cover story inside the magazine is about a new housing boom in Phoenix. It's a fairly non-controversial piece about home builders, house flippers, short sales, real estate agents and people who found themselves underwater with their mortgages. Apparently, things are on the rebound in Phoenix and prices are again rising after the housing bubble of a few years ago. But the cover makes no reference to the Phoenix housing market or players; it instead portrays a popular, but fallacious view of the housing bubble that blames the entire market meltdown on greedy, low-income home buyers who took advantage of the banks through fraudalent loan applications. It's a storyline popular in certain circles that absolves the banking and loan industries and portrays them as victims with no responsibility for reckless behavior that crashed the economy.

While borrowers were not completely blameless, pinning the entire economic crisis on minority home buyers is a storyline that Businessweek could never have gotten away with, because the facts are simply not there. They have too much credibility to even try to go there with their writing.

But this is a story that was all too easy tell visually—which they did with this outrageous cover.

I really can't comprehend how this cover made it past even one employee let alone past editors and publishers and all the way to print. But it did...and in the 21st century, not the 19th.

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The President's SOTU Slide Presentation

Did you know that the President gave a slide presentation Tuesday night? Barack Obama did not pull an Andrew Cuomo and use actual slides behind him, but there were indeed accompanying graphics and visuals to his State of the Union address. As in years past, the White House released an "Enhanced" State of the Union video presentation available on their website.

The White House's solution to visually communicating the President's message is to place vertical graphics next to the video at selected points. If you haven't seen how the visuals support and enhance the speech, definitely take a look.

This is a technique that I really loved initially, but this year the White House's graphics department seemed asleep at the wheel. Believe me, I know how quickly these graphics were probably created, but while there were a few moments in which the visuals truly aided the message, I felt as the entire approach lacked the touch of a skilled information designer.

There was confusing use of highlights—is the focus the blue or the red figures...?



There were color combinations that would get you kicked out of a freshman year design course—red text over blue "vibrates" and is a rookie mistake...



There was lackluster imagery, cheesy text effects and overuse of all caps...



And downright confusing stats and graphics...



What was good?

Some very direct charts and good colors...



Good use of imagery and humor...



And humanity and a sense of the personal...



I personally don't look forward to the day that projection screens are installed behind the President for the State of the Union, but it may just be inevitable.