Category: Visual Storytelling

Every year I have the chance to visit my grandparents in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. Visiting every year, I have grown to become more and more comfortable here. While I often took these visits for granted in the past, I recently went and captured so many great memories.

These images reflect some of my favorite moments in Puerto Rico; with family, sightseeing, or just walking around, Puerto Rico is too beautiful of an island to not see!

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Welcomed by the beautiful trees and forest of Yabucoa behind my grandparents’ house, this view never gets old. This image captures the lush, layered beauty of Puerto Rico’s eastern countryside. The landscape stretches out in vibrant greens—palm trees, thick tropical foliage, and rolling hills—showing just how alive and abundant the environment is. Soft sunlight warms the treetops, giving the scene a gentle glow and highlights the textures of the plants that define the region’s natural identity.

In the distance, a few homes and rooftops peek through the greenery, reminding of the quiet coexistence between daily life and the island’s overwhelming natural presence. Altogether, the image feels peaceful, grounded, and deeply connected to the place—reflecting both the beauty of Yabucoa and the personal significance of seeing it from my grandparents’ home.

Later identified (by AI of course) as a desert rose flower, this flower grows outside my grandparents’ house in their garden. This close-up photo of the flower captures a moment of quiet beauty rooted in place and memory. The flower’s vivid pink-and-white petals stand out sharply against the soft greens of the surrounding leaves, making it the natural focal point of the image. Its brightness and symmetry create a sense of vibrancy and resilience—qualities often associated with tropical plants that thrive under intense sun and shifting weather.

The elements of this flower and the blurred steps leading into the house create an intimate and nostalgic feeling; a small but meaningful detail from a place connected to heritage, comfort, and care.

This image, taken on a visit to Old San Juan, captures the very lively, layered character of Old San Juan, where the city’s colonial architecture and everyday street life blend with bursts of tropical color. In the foreground, five beautifully-colored parrots perched on a simple stand becomes the focal point, symbolizing the island’s lively natural spirit and the way local culture often spills out into public spaces. Behind them, a small gathering under a white tent of tourists waiting to take a picture with them adds a sense of casual community and movement. The older building, framed by tall palm trees and a muted gray sky, grounds the scene in Old San Juan’s historic past, creating a contrast between the permanence of its architecture and the immediacy of its street life. Altogether, the image reflects how the city seamlessly intertwines history, culture, and tropical vibrancy in a single moment.

This photo gently captures a moment of calm amid the rugged setting of an ATV adventure park in Luquillo. The ginger stray cat, curled comfortably on a bed of dry leaves and warm soil, seems entirely at peace despite the bustle such places usually host. Its relaxed posture and half-closed eyes suggest a creature that has learned to carve out pockets of tranquility wherever it can. The contrast between the rough ground, scattered foliage, and the soft fur of the cat adds texture to the scene, while the wooden wall and nearby plant create a sheltered, almost homelike corner. Altogether, the image highlights the quiet resilience of the island’s many stray animals—finding rest and comfort in unlikely places, and becoming small, tender reminders of life’s gentler moments.

This photo captures a lighthearted, in-the-moment snapshot that feels both playful and intimate. My nephew and I sit side-by-side in the back seat, each making an exaggerated, unsure expression that gives the image a candid charm. How close we are highlights our connection, with our faces mirroring each other’s mood in a funny, spontaneous way. Soft daylight filters through the car windows, illuminating our features and adding a natural warmth to the scene. Altogether, it’s a tender, goofy pause during a tiring day’s adventure—one of those small, shared moments that ends up becoming more memorable than the destination itself.

There is a relaxed and radiant feel in this nighttime photo at Distrito T-Mobile. The vibrant red halter dress stands out beautifully against the greenery and warm lights around me. The string lights wrapped around the palm tree and the softly lit outdoor seating area creates a cozy, lively atmosphere. This image has a a stylish, confident, and genuinely warm vibe, similar to how the memory felt in real time.

Ending with my grandparents’ view once again, this image captures a calm, summery moment the balcony surrounded by lush green trees and a bright sky. The white Inter Miami jersey and matching white bottoms gives the picture a sporty, clean aesthetic. Holding up the camera with a relaxed face, this image feels comfortable, stylish, and gives the feel of enjoying the peaceful nature around me.

Conclusion

Overall, creating this photoessay was a new and enjoyable experience. Looking through pictures from my recent trips, I kind of already knew which images I wanted to include and talk about. My goal for this project was to highlight the beauty of Puerto Rico, as well as taking a look at everything around you. While you may see it often, views like these are extremely beautiful and shouldn’t be taken for granted! I categorized my pictures through the order in which they were taken, and carefully analyzed them as if I saw them for the first time. Using Gestalt principles, rules of composition, and more, these images all somewhat followed a narrative arc, as they went in the order of my trip.

Proximity, simplicity, and other Gestalt principles were seen throughout these images. The image of my nephew and I show proximity and highlight our close relationship, while the image of the flower can show simplicity and proximity, as the plethora of flowers show how close they are to one another.

The idea of color theory is also shown throughout these images. For example, the images of the vibrant birds with a somewhat grayish highlight the placement of the island’s natural wildlife in such a public setting. Other images, such as me in my red dress or the vibrant flowers show brighter pops of color, and contrast from their duller backgrounds.

Rules of composition can also be applied to these images! The rule of thirds, explained in Tom Schroeppel’s The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video places subjects on certain third lines to allow viewers’ eyes to roam around the image. I personally love this rule, and now use it for a lot of my pictures after learning about it. The last image shows me on the right, placed right on the guided line, and shows viewers more of my beautiful background and blue cloudy sky. A contrasting image, however, of the cat in the middle of the picture is an example of balance. Right in the center of the image, the image seems more comfortable and the colors go well with one another.

Beyond the technical aspects, this project also helped me connect more deeply with the emotional meaning behind my photos. Each image represents a small moment in time that felt ordinary when it happened, but looking back, I can see how meaningful those moments truly were. Whether it was spending time with my nephew, admiring local wildlife, or taking in the natural scenery from my grandparents’ house, these photos remind me of the importance of slowing down and appreciating experiences as they come. Photography allows us to freeze these moments so we can re-experience them, reflect on them, and share them with others long after they’ve passed.

Additionally, this project encouraged me to be more intentional with how I approach photography in the future. Instead of just taking pictures randomly, I now think more about the story behind each shot and how visual elements—such as color, framing, and composition—can shape the emotion or meaning of an image. Creating this photoessay made me realize that photographs are more than just images; they are narratives that combine technical skill with personal perspective. I’ve gained a greater appreciation for how the visual choices we make influence the viewer’s experience, and how even the simplest details can contribute to the overall message. This assignment didn’t just deepen my understanding of visual storytelling—it also strengthened my connection to Puerto Rico and the memories I made there.

Brands today have unlocked new ways of engaging newer audiences and luring them into buying products that they’ve never seen before. How do they do it? Well, besides the power of social media, the power of behavioral economics has constantly been proven to persuade customers into buying newer products!

Behavioral economics studies how people actually behave — which is often messy, biased, and satisficing — rather than how they’d behave if perfectly rational. Designers translate those predictable biases into tools: defaults, framing, anchors, scarcity cues, and social proof are all ways to shape choice architecture so users make better (or at least more desirable) choices. In an article, Bridgeable collects practical BE “principles” for designers and show how anchoring, default settings, and loss aversion can be applied in real product flows and capturing newer consumers.

Gestalt Principles

Two psychological toolkits designers rely on heavily are Gestalt principles and affordances. Gestalt gives us laws of perceptual organization — proximity, similarity, figure–ground, etc. — that help users analyze visual information immediately. Let’s name a few!

• Similarity: Do the elements look alike?! Same colors, font, size, texture?!!
• Simplicity: Our minds perceive everything in it’s simplest form.

• Proximity: We perceive elements as belonging to the same group if they are closer together.

The good use of Gestalt’s principles reduces cognitive load on consumers: group related controls, make the primary action pop, let the eye follow natural continuity. Canva’s summary on Gestalt offers great visual entry point for these ideas.

Affordances are the cues that tell a user how to interact with an object (a button that looks pressable, a slider that looks draggable). When affordances align with user expectations, decisions are frictionless; when they don’t align, users hesitate, make errors, or abandon tasks. The Interaction Design Foundation’s article explains why designing obvious affordances is crucial when designing.

Creating Emotional and Sensory Decisions

Behavioral economics also reminds designers that decisions are emotional and sensory, not just rational. Multi-sensory design (sound, motion, haptics, even smell in physical environments) creates stronger memories and shapes preferences. Digital designers are now bringing subtle sound cues, motion, and tactile feedback into interfaces to make experiences stickier — not as tricks, but as an extension of the brand’s personality and affordances.

“Every experience in design is multi-sensory, whether we want it or not.”

~ Akna Marquez, Introduction to Multi-sensory Design

Behavioral economics gives designers the power to shape decisions, but the best designs aren’t about forcing behavior—they’re about guiding it. Thoughtful nudges, clear affordances, and perceptually intuitive layouts help users move through an experience effortlessly, leaving them feeling confident, informed, and in control.

Every click, scroll, or swipe is a tiny moment where design meets human psychology. By understanding how perception, emotion, and bias influence decisions, designers can craft experiences that feel natural and satisfying. The subtle science behind our choices isn’t just a tool, it’s a bridge between human behavior and genuine, meaningful design.

In an economy where consumers increasingly pay for experiences rather than just goods or services, design has quietly become one of the most powerful value creators. Designers, now, can be seen as architects of value, not just aesthetics.

Design creates value through emotional connection. Don Norman’s ideas of emotional design helps explain why: great experiences operate at three levels — visceral (instant sensory reaction), behavioral (usability and pleasure in use), and reflective (meaning and identity tied to the product). When a product scores on all three, it doesn’t just satisfy a need — it becomes memorable and preferred. This is why a designer item or a warm coffee shop visit can feel like an emotional purchase compared to a transactional one.

Design Tactics That Speak Emotion

Practical tactics designers use to evoke emotion include color, typography, and interaction choreography. Color is one of the fastest emotional shortcuts: marketers and designers use red for urgency or passion, blue for trust and calm, and green for growth and health. Thoughtful color systems can surely increase recognition and nudge choices at the point of sale or sign-up.

Typography matters too! Typeface choices carry personality: serifs can signal tradition and credibility, sans-serifs feel modern and clean, and script or display faces can feel playful or luxurious, or even romantic. Recent neuroscience and UX research shows that letter shapes and readability influence not only comprehension but also emotional response and trust — meaning typography can be a design tool for shaping how someone feels about a brand before they even read a word.

Designing Through Feelings

Some of the most successful brands use design to stage emotional experiences. Apple is a master of visceral delight — its minimal product design, clean typography, and gallery-like stores make every interaction feel intentional. The company also delivers behavioral satisfaction through intuitive interfaces and reflective value through brand identity; owning Apple products can signal creativity and design awareness for consumers.

Barnes & Noble takes a similar approach through sensory design with their cafes. The cafe’s lighting, music, and books all around work together to create comfort and familiarity, turning an ordinary coffee run into a ritualized experience for readers. Both brands demonstrate that emotion, not just function, can drive loyalty and premium pricing.

Using Design Tools to Map Emotion

Designers also use emotional models to be intentional. Tools like Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions help teams map which emotions (joy, trust, surprise, anticipation) they want to trigger and then choose design elements accordingly — for example, using warm tones and rounded shapes to evoke comfort and trust, or contrast, motion, and surprise to evoke excitement. This moves design from “making things pretty” to a strategic role in experience engineering.

Finally, measurable ROI (return-on-investment) follows emotional connection. Experiences that evoke positive emotions drive retention, word-of-mouth, and willingness to pay. The practical takeaway for visual storytellers and product teams is simple: design every touchpoint (visuals, words, interactions, environment) with the emotional arc in mind — stage the visceral, deliver useful behavioral outcomes, and create reflective meaning that customers may want to bring into their identity.

Design in the experience economy should not be skipped — it is crucial! When designers combine evidence (color & type research), models (Norman’s three levels; Plutchik’s wheel), and brand staging (Apple, Starbucks), they do more than shape appearances: they create value that customers emotionally invest in — and gladly pay for.

In so many ways, designers can make any experience memorable through design. Such emotional responses by consumers will encourage them to come back, buy again, and refer the product to others. In my opinion, design can probably attract more consumers than the product itself. It is up to the designer to make the product stand out.

Designers are constantly asked to imagine the future — sleeker products, smarter systems, faster solutions. But imagination alone isn’t enough; it needs form, context, and meaning. That’s where design fiction comes in. Design fiction blends storytelling with design practice, using narrative and visual artifacts to make speculative futures feel real enough to explore. Instead of asking “What will the future look like?”, it asks, “What if this future existed — and how would it feel to live there?”

In an exercise I participated in called ‘The Thing From the Future‘, I was randomly given four words under the themes arc, terrain, object, and mood. With the four words generated, I was assigned to create a product or solution and describe it even further. When I first played the game, I thought it would just be a fun brainstorming activity — random prompts and creating odd gadgets from imaginary futures. But the moment I drew the most random card combinations, a new creative side of me unlocked. From the EchoBracelet, a wearable device that lets people replay sounds from their favorite memories, to the MemoryMirror, a mirror that allows elderly people to look into some of their most cherished memories, I created such random ideas from the most random words. After so much thinking, I began to realize that I wasn’t just designing an object — I was designing a story.

This was my starting point — my call to adventure when researching. The activity wasn’t only imagining technology; it was visualizing emotion. The EchoBracelet had to communicate intimacy, nostalgia, and connection through the design alone. That’s when I turned to the concept of design fiction, a method that uses storytelling and visual artifacts to explore possible futures. I enjoyed Richard Buday’s definition:

“Using fiction to test the use and acceptance of unusual designs”, Richard Buday 2020.

What Is Design Fiction and Where Does It Come From?!

To summarize, design fiction is a practice that creates story-worlds and populates them with diegetic prototypes — artifacts that exist inside these fictional worlds and make that world believable. Popular science fiction author Bruce Sterling introduced the term design fiction in the mid-2000s then expanded on it, calling it “the deliberate use of diegetic prototypes to suspend disbelief about change.”

How This Relates to Visual Design

Storytelling is at the core of effective design fiction, and it directly connects to how we approach visual design. The Medium article “How to Use the Hero’s Journey as a Design Thinking Tool” explains how narrative frameworks can guide design processes. The “Hero’s Journey” — where a protagonist leaves a familiar world, faces challenges, and returns transformed — mirrors how users experience a product. Good design visualizes this transformation, helping audiences see change, conflict, and resolution through composition, motion, and tone.

Conclusion

Ultimately, design fiction helps designers move from problem-solving to possibility-making. It uses narrative storytelling and visuals to ask deeper questions about responsibility, culture, and values. In a time when design often feels driven by algorithms or consumer trends, design fiction reminds us that the future is not something that happens to us — it’s something we can co-create, critique, and visualize together.

We all know the classic saying, “pictures are worth a thousand words”. But have you ever thought about how true the saying actually is?

Taking pictures on my digital camera has become one of my favorite hobbies recently. The pictures on my camera range from beautiful scenery to pictures of my friends and family. My digital camera contains basically my entire life’s memories so far.

I want to connect the concept of digital photos to visual storytelling. Defined by Andrew Losowsky, the “essence of visual storytelling is {the} combination of emotional reaction and narrative information,” by using the “colors, typography, style, balance, format of an image “{that} will generate that first instinctive smile or frown” (Losowsky, 4). In other words, various elements of an image including the colors or what is happening in it should tell the audience everything they need to know. There shouldn’t be any extra explanation needed, and these visual projects should be clear enough for anyone to appreciate and understand.

In an article by Mike Montalto from nonprofit Amplifi, he mentions that one of the best methods of visual storytelling is authenticity: keeping things real. If you ask me, digital pictures can be some of the most authentic since there aren’t any filters or fancy equipment enhancing the images, just the auto or manual mode and a flash.

To prove my point that digital camera pictures tell some of the best stories, I will show some of my favorite digital pictures from my three-month trip to Los Angeles!

This was the first picture I took on the trip! Excited to see just about everything, I took lots of pictures like any tourist would. Way in the back is the Hollywood sign, in the giant grassy mountains. Almost covered with billboards, you can see a busy street and a tall building, that one being the Hollywood United Methodist Church. While the picture is pretty grainy and doesn’t have the best quality, the Hollywood sign right in the center gives a glimpse of excitedness from an exploring tourist.

It’s been one week! Getting a bit more used to the busyness of Los Angeles, my mom visited for the weekend. With the lit-up ferris wheel and restaurant in the background, any California native would recognize the Santa Monica Pier. Almost pitch black in the sky, the dock was pretty windy and made things a lot colder, as you can tell from my hoodie.

In this image, you see four friends, all smiling with one another, having a good time. The small sign in the back says TCL Chinese Theater, one of Hollywood’s most popular places. The hand and feet prints in the back mark some of Hollywood’s most significant figures, and you can see some intrigued people in the background of the image. As it was getting later, the friends are dressed pretty warm for a cold night ahead.

An article by Erica Santiago explains various elements of visual storytelling, with one of them being emotion, where “your visual story must make your audience feel something that generates an emotional connection”. I feel that this image may make an audience feel warm because of the lighting, and also how loud the picture comes across. With so many people in the background, you can tell that the environment is pretty loud and many tourists are around.

If you couldn’t tell from the face makeup, this was Halloween! We took this on the balcony of our hotel, right in the middle of downtown LA. My lazy attempt at recreating SAW and Dylan’s football costume take over the image, and our poses fill the image with silliness. The high buildings and busy street in the background also make the image a bit loud, as there’s a lot going on around us.

If you couldn’t tell by the lanterns and lights hanging across the alleyway, I was able to make it to Little Tokyo! One of my favorite spots I visited, the small district was lively and pretty active at night. I had to dress pretty warm for the nighttime in my cardigan, and the trees helped in the aesthetic of my photo. This photo doesn’t show off as loud as the other ones, as Little Tokyo was a pretty calm spot.

If there was one image I had to choose that seemed the loudest out of all of my pictures, it would definitely be this one. To me, anything Disney-related image just screams overcrowded, lots of walking, and lots of people – which is exactly what happened. The many strollers, the matching couple Disney shirts, the backpacks on everyone’s backs; this image captures the Disney experience pretty well. The image itself I feel portrays a perfect day, since the sky is scarily clear and the Disney castle is right in front of me. This day was definitely perfect, and wouldn’t trade it for the world.

This image was the last picture I took in California. Still in Disney, the image shows a giant rock behind me, that being one of Disney’s Star Wars rides. I think the Goofy hat signifies a good time spent at Disney, and the busy background shows a loud place. You can probably tell I was a bit tired in this moment since the last three months were so much fun. With my vintage Mickey Mouse t-shirt and my Cali zip-up hoodie, I was pretty much ready to go home after this picture was taken.

All in all, these images represented one of my favorite memories in life so far. Through visual storytelling, these images can tell newer audiences exactly what’s happening and help them feel what’s going on. The element of authenticity is crucial in any kind of visual storytelling, whether it be images, video, etc. Digital pictures can be perfect for capturing any emotion or occasion, and I don’t plan on putting my camera down any time soon.