When I was a kid, my brother and I liked to read comic books a lot. I guess, back then, Asterix was our favorite and we loved the running gag of Obelix not being allowed to drink the magic potion.
Somehow, reading comics was frowned upon by the grownups, because it was "too easy".🧐 One did not need to put in the effort of "really reading", as a lot of the description was explained through the drawing. It left only the dialogue and an eventual "swoosh" ⚡️ or "boom" 💥 to be printed in letters. So the atmosphere and all the details were lost, according to the grownups.
But a comic can in fact summarize hundreds of pages of a book in only few snapshots. 📸 And it can only do that because the drawings explain so much of the background, that it makes text redundant to follow the essence of the story.
If you think of your data stories & presentations as comics, then you will quickly understand, that it is not important to display every little detail. You can do that more effectively by showing that image via a picture, a graph or a diagram.
And in today‘s business world, isn’t that more efficient than making yourself go through the hassle of reading hundreds of pages of text?
I think the kid in us is on to something!
