Storytelling Guides, Famous Logos and Audience Building

Hey all,

As mentioned last week, we have a new thing starting soon. It’s called Proper Fancy. It’s like a team Show and Tell but for people without a team. Or even for people with a team that don’t do this sort of thing.

When we did our Scroll Stoppers research, a lot of people told us that one of the downsides of hybrid work is that they miss the casual sharing of knowledge that happens in the workplace. Even the ambient sharing that happens is lost when you work alone. So join us. You don’t have to share, you can just listen and watch.

Right. Some stories for you. Go get ’em!

Hugh

How the Cultural Sector Can Use YouTube to Reach a Larger Audience (7 min read)

9 Free Guides to Make You a Better Storyteller (Twitter thread)

Everything is a Remix – The Complete, Updated 2023 Edition (60 min watch)

AI and the American Smile (8 min read)

The Power of Giving Names to Your Feelings (5 min play)

The Woman Behind the Most Famous Logo in the World (4 min read)

Why Are All Action Heroes Called Jack, James or John? (12 min read)

The Cabinet of Wikipedian Curiosities (Multiple reads)

Can You Think of Something Worse (3 min read)

If 10 Iconic Directors Shot the World Cup… (Twitter thread)

How can we help you?

Storythings is a strategy and production company based in Brighton, London, Bristol, Berlin, and Ibiza. We'd love to help you with some creative and bold ideas. Here are 3 reasons to get in touch. 

1. Audience Strategy - Do you struggle to understand constantly changing audience behaviours, and what strategies you need to reach them?2. Content Format Development - Do you want to develop and test content formats that give you a direct relationship with your audience? (eg newsletters, podcasts, publications, or video series).3. Production - Do you need help developing and running an existing or new content format, and growing loyal audiences around them?We do other things too. We're very friendly and always enjoy meeting people, so get in touch. 

How the Cultural Sector Can Use YouTube to Reach a Larger AudienceIf you work in the cultural sector and your YouTube strategy is to use it as free storage then think again. It’s a massively wasted opportunity to reach larger and more diverse audiences and achieve more meaningful engagement. This excellent piece from One Further breaks down how you can do better. I particularly like the section on how the algorithm LOVES formats. (7 min read)

9 Free Guides to Make You a Better StorytellerThere’s a lot of tried and tested good stuff in this thread. Lessons in storytelling from Aristotle to Southpark. You might also enjoy these 17 Copywriting Principles.(Twitter)Everything is a Remix – The Complete, Updated 2023 EditionEleven years ago I watched filmmaker Kirby Ferguson and artist Austin Kleon talk at SXSW about their new projects, Everything is a Remix and Steal Like an Artist. Both talked on the subject of creativity and how all ideas are copies of something else. Since then Austin has written three books whilst Kirby has continued to work on his Remix masterpiece. It’s a wonderful documentary from a man who has obsessively researched and refined this story about creativity for over a decade. (60 min watch)AI and the American SmileBefore reading this fascinating piece, I’d never really given too much thought to the cultural context of smiling. How we smile, when we smile, why we smile, and what it means is deeply culturally contextual. So when AI photography has been trained on images that are largely North American or European cultures where the role of the smile is specific to those areas, images of smiling people from other cultures with the American smile become something quite different: “In flattening the diversity of facial expressions of civilizations around the world, AI had collapsed the spectrum of history, culture, photography, and emotion concepts into a singular, monolithic perspective.”(8 min read)

The Power of Giving Names to Your FeelingsEveryone should put aside 5 minutes over the weekend to do it. And return to it. Those very clever visual storytellers The Pudding have developed this nice interactive set of tools that help you name and visualise how you are really feeling. Share it with someone who you think might benefit from it. (5 min play)

The Woman Behind the Most Famous Logo in the WorldI finally got around to reading Phil Knight’s Shoe Dog. I didn’t love it like others seem to. One thing that stuck out was a surprising gap in knowledge I had about the brand. I was already familiar with the origin of the Just Do It slogan but knew nothing about how the iconic swoosh came about. (4 min read)

Why Are All Action Heroes Called Jack, James or John?Think about it. John Wick, Jason Bourne, Jack Reacher, John McClane, James Bond, Jack Bauer, and John James Rambo. Slate decided to look at over 2000 action movies in an attempt to get to the bottom of the mystery. (12 min read)

The Cabinet of Wikipedian CuriositiesThe personal website of writer Sam Enright consists of links to a bunch of fascinating and trivial Wikipedia pages. There are at least 20-30 future podcast episodes in this collection. Prepare to fall down a very deep curiosity hole. (Multiple reads)Can You Think of Something WorseBooks. History. Art. Drag queens in libraries. (3 min read)

If 10 Iconic Directors Shot the World Cup…This is what it would look like. A project made just for fun using Midjourney. BTW. The new Wes Anderson trailer is THE most Wes Anderson thing ever to be created. (Twitter thread)

We hope you've enjoyed this week's newsletter. I'm sure some of your friends would love to read it. Sharing it would be really appreciated. If you've received this from a friend you can subscribe below and get it direct to your inbox every Friday.

Thanks for reading. We’ll see you all next week.

Hugh, Matt, Anjali and the whole team at Storythings.