Balancing science and storytelling

Storytelling is a powerful way to communicate scientific information and make it memorable. Scientific information is complex. Often there is no clear start or end. Themes overlap or feel separate. The key to communicating science effectively is to find the story.

We worked with the independent charitable organisation, Arid Recovery, to develop a printed brochure about their groundbreaking science, different fields of research and collaborations with Traditional Owners. With so much varied information – and a brief to keep it short – a clear story was needed.

We analysed existing content from the organisation’s website, blog posts, social media, annual reports, strategic plans and conversations with the CEO. We identified the key objectives for the brochure, and what was needed to achieve them – in this case, the right balance of scientific information and emotive content. To pull everything together, we developed a series of individual stories which represented the variety of work done by the organisation. The brochure was designed around a visual timeline running across the pages, to take readers through the organisation’s journey and successes.

We were impressed with how the Biotext team developed a coherent and motivating story from a raft of documents and web material describing our organisation. They found a sweet spot between accurately described information and engaging narrative, and produced a beautiful product.

Katherine Tuft – CEO, Arid Recovery

Our role

Content analysis – we analysed existing content from different sources to identify strong messages and stories.

Visual design – we designed the brochure to be visually engaging, sophisticated and aligned with the client’s brand

Writing and editing – we wrote the text for the brochure and edited for flow, plain English and readability through several rounds of editing and proofreading