Designing Digital Media

Design Tips

It's easy to design digital media with the tools available today, however, designing digital media that inspires action, changes thinking/behavior, or goes viral is quite a challenge!

First and foremost, design with your audience in mind (see: Getting a scientific message across means taking human nature into account). Make sure to debunk misconceptions about the topic - Researchers have found that students are less likely to watch a science video when they think they already know the information from the video, even if their knowledge is incorrect (Helll-ooo! Watching Videos Does Not Necessarily Lead to Learning).

Here are some more tips to creating more impactful media products:

Make sure the multimedia is accessible - Add closed captions to videos, include a transcript for audio recordings/podcasts, use ALT text to describe an image.

Hook your audience - Use humor, surprise, inquiry, a short vignette (Need more ideas? Read 12 Presentation Hooks Used By the Best TED Presenters)

Be creative and social - Break away from the traditional mold of educational multimedia (aka lecture videos, documentaries, infographics full of far too much information). How might you encourage climate change action in the same way that the Ice Bucket Challenge raised $40 million for ALS? Could you inspire climate change fundraising through the bottle cap challenge? Or, maybe design a new viral dance for climate change!

Use visuals - quite simply, visuals are more memorable than words. The less on-screen text, the better. After watching this short TED Talk, what do you remember most? The visuals or the words? (Research article: Pictures Move People More than Words Emotional images can change people's behavior, while similarly charged words do not).

Use Mayer's Multimedia Design principles - Signal key information with text, arrows, or sound effects; use visuals and narration rather than on-screen text; get rid of extraneous content; chunk topics into shorter videos (in the Snapchat 10-second-video generation, the shorter the better).

Use media in an ethical and legal manner - If you upload a video to YouTube with a popular song as the background music, it will be flagged and taken down. Use your own original art or Creative Commons works with attribution.

Heath & Heath's Made to Stick Principles

The following principles provide a valuable guide to designing captivating media:

      • Simple - Don't overwhelm with facts, ideas, or information. Use the rule of 3 (what 3 things do you want the audience to take away from your media?).

      • Unexpected - Information and ideas that are shocking are more memorable. How can you surprise the audience with your media?

      • Concrete - Don't use abstract terms or complex jargon. Present information in a way that is relevant to the audience. This is one of the biggest challenges with climate change as we often focus on abstract ideas (aka the future) or topics that are out of sight and mind (aka deforestation in the Amazon).

      • Credible - Why should the audience believe you? Credibility can come in many forms (education degree, profession, personal experience). Consider incorporating information from NASA, National Geographic, The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations, and other reputable sources.

      • Emotion - Simply increasing an individual’s heart rate results in a higher likelihood of sharing a video. "Virality is partially driven by physiological arousal. Content that evokes high-arousal positive (awe) or negative (anger or anxiety) emotions is more viral. Content that evokes low-arousal, or deactivating, emotions (e.g., sadness) is less viral" (Berger & Milkman, 2011).

      • Story - When you tell a story, people not only listen/watch, parts of their brain activate as if they are experiencing the story themselves (read: The Science of Storytelling: What Listening to a Story Does to Our Brains). Thus, storytelling is an incredibly powerful and impactful teaching tool (learn more: Stories are better than lectures at teaching us about health).

The power of emotion: "The commercial originally aired in 2007, and managed to raise $30 million in the first two years of its release, according to The New York Times. It's the most successful fundraising effort for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals" (Redbookmag).

Storytelling & humor: In 2012, "Heal the Bay debuts its Jeremy Irons-narrated mockumentary, The Majestic Plastic Bag, bringing awareness to the issue of single-use plastics in an offbeat, creative way. Racking up over 2 million views, this film put Heal the Bay in the spotlight as the leader in the legislative fight against the scourge of plastic pollution" (Heal the Bay).

Design Tools & Resources

Digital Media Choice Board

Going Viral

How do you design digital media that goes viral? Watch these two videos and you'll notice some of the tips from above and discover new ideas.