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Multimedia Design 1 - Narrative Design

Multimedia presentations have the ability to immerse an audience in the content, captivate their imagination and wow them with your message. The impact is much greater than can be achieved with a PowerPoint slide show. But, to transform a presentation into something more powerful, the application must be designed around a narrative.

Narratives provide a way to liven presentations, give them special, unique qualities and make them enjoyable, fun and appealing to watch and use. While good graphic design can make your content visually strong, developing a narrative goes much further. It becomes a time-based theme to the multimedia work.

In the simplest terms, a narrative is a story you incorporate into your presentation. A strong story is one that develops and draws you in as you move through it. Narratives can be subtle, direct, realistic or abstract. A common narrative is a journey, which can be expressed in many ways. A journey can be real or imaginary, physical or spatial. A presentation on the Sydney Opera House may use the narrative of a physical journey to give the user the experience of traveling through the building. Images and animation could be used to give the illusion that the user is actually walking through the building in the same way he/she would if actually there.

Narratives can be abstract. You may use a texture, which recurs through the presentation as a way to describe the tactile nature of your subject. A successful narrative is one that allows for a developing idea that helps explain and promotes the content over time.

When developing a narrative, it is useful to incorporate metaphors or analogies to help explain your idea. For example, using the narrative of a journey in relation to a presentation on Venice, gondolas and canals can be used as metaphors for the interface elements. Clicking a gondola could make it sail down a canal and take you (as the user) to a specific part of the presentation and, in doing so, explore Venice. The gondola and canals become navigational metaphors. In the same way analogies are used to explain concepts, a navigational metaphor helps explain how to interact with a presentation.

A presentation may include multiple navigational metaphors under one narrative. For example, a multimedia presentation that promotes the work of an architectural firm can follow a journey through their offices. The user may start at the elevator and click on floor buttons to move to various rooms. In each room, clicking on different objects can link to further information. Clicking a drafting table may link to plans, clicking a computer may display digital renderings. The navigational metaphor can change for different parts of the presentation. The collection of various metaphors combines together to form a composite narrative.

It is important to always make sure metaphors are consistent and easily understood by your audience, as well as being appropriate to your subject.

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