3 Things About Storyboarding That You May Not Have Seen

I’ve had a lot of storyboarding inspiration lately…

1) Notebook, purchased at Muji

2) Pretty amazing example, seen at MoMA:

Storyboard for The Civil Wars: A Tree Is Best Measured When It Is Down, an opera by Robert Wilson. (Photo by Scott Unrein)

3) Video on storyboarding, posted on MinuteBio

I’ve been reflecting on how much these notions of storyboarding really relate to e-learning. Most of the e-learning storyboards I’ve seen focus much less on the visual design than these do, and much more on which words need to appear on screen and which words should be spoken.

I generally do the kind of storyboard that just communicates which words the developer needs to put on which screen, but only in “development”, after the interaction itself has been designed through a prototype. That way Word or PowerPoint or whichever tool I’m using doesn’t force me down a completely linear path; the tool has to accommodate the interaction I’ve designed.