A few days back, three genre-bending stories were published here, here, and here on Medium. They make up a series of fictional stories based on photographs by Koci, an Emmy-winning multimedia journalist, two-time Pulitzer nominee, and well-known Instagram photographer. The project is an unabashed experiment in visual storytelling, though I’ll admit I’m a bit biased—I served as its editor. But as our small, wide-eyed team alternately hacked and blundered its way to engaging stories, we learned stark lessons that transcend the narrow scope of still-image fiction.

For my part, this post is a summary of those lessons. It starts here with a bit of theory, and then continues with guides to the two most effective visual storytelling techniques currently in use on Medium.

Theory

As it went, our first challenge had nothing to do with storytelling. Instead, we came face-to-face with you—the citizens of the Medium medium—and specifically, your behaviors, habits, and expectations.

Introspection is helpful here. Consider what keeps you coming back to Medium. Great stories? Beautiful interface? Few distractions? These are my reasons, and they all fall under the broad theory of the uniform reading experience. For most readers this stuff is subconscious, but if you plan to publish on Medium, it’s essential to know that readers enter your stories with the expectation of reading. Seemingly obvious stuff, so let me take a step back. Way back.

This double page spread is from a 1965 issue of Life Magazine. Note how your eye moves across the page, first from the woman’s face, then to smaller images, and finally to the pull-quote in the upper left. No one expects readers to consume the story from beginning to end. Via: http://sighswhispers.blogspot.com/2010/12/we-are-animals-in-world-no-one-knows.html

Waayyyyy back. To tell stories with photos, printed newspapers and magazines have traditionally relied on multi-page spreads. Here, editors arrange photos, graphics, and text across physical space with the intention of inviting readers to “hop in” at any point. The experience fits the medium: People flip quickly through printed publications, so the more entry points, like captions and pull-quotes, the better the odds of catching a reader’s attention. At its best/worst (depending on who you ask), the experience is more like exploring, less like reading.

This Huffington Post story on New Year celebrations begins with roughly 300 words and finishes with the slideshow widget here. Note the plethora of distractions.

On the other hand, publishers on the web love slideshows. Almost always, they live in their own widget, and it can take multiple clicks to switch between them and the written story, if there even is one. Where did we get this standard? The first reason is frustrating: the most common tools, especially WordPress, weren’t built for rich visual storytelling. The second reason is gross: many publishers use clunky slideshow widgets with the intention of increasing page views.

You might have noticed that neither print nor online publishers put storytelling first—distractions are plentiful, and sometimes intentional. But readers on Medium expect the reverse: they want stories that can be read from start to finish without interruption. No choose-your-own-adventure playgrounds, no distracting gimmicks.

In order for our visual stories to meet these expectations, we developed the following strategies.

Strategy 1: The seamless, single narrative (best for fiction)

There are many ways to constrain a story, and as we learned on this project, the choice of fiction had a huge impact on our visual strategy. What’s it like to read a great novel? How about a comic book? Or a movie? Our hypothesis was that great fiction must be engrossing—for non-fiction, that’s optional—and ideally, readers will complete a fictional story in a single sitting. To translate this to Medium, we established four guidelines: