The Art of the Story: Creating Visual Narratives
Debbie Millman · Writer, educator, artist, brand consultant
A brand consultant's crafting session on turning your own writing into felt, twine, and typography art, more studio demo than transferable curriculum.
Debbie Millman's class is less a taught skill than an invitation into her studio, and it is most useful for anyone who wants that invitation.
What the course actually walks through
The structure runs from writing to editing to materials to a live demonstration of one piece, called "Fare Thee Well," built from dyed twine and adhesive felt letters. The early lessons are a survey of visual-storytelling history and objects, from a childhood Little Golden Book called Words through Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, Art Spiegelman's Maus, and a shelf of typographic ephemera like Jenny Holzer pencils and Barbara Kruger pillows. This section works as inspiration and context but delivers no technique of its own. The genuinely instructional stretch arrives in "Finding Your Story" and "Editing Your Story," where Millman gives real, usable advice: mine old journals and diaries for material, decide on a narrative structure before starting, and above all cut the first paragraph of any personal essay because it usually just announces what the piece is about to say. She also warns against apologizing or self-justifying in the writing, urging the reader to show rather than explain.
The materials lesson is a genuine inventory of tools, colored pencils, gray-tone Rembrandt pencils, oil pastels, gel pens for dark paper, adhesive mailbox-style letters, and vellum for layering repeated type. It is a useful reference for anyone about to attempt similar work, though it reads more like a supply list than a lesson in technique. The crafting demonstration that follows is the closest the class comes to a how-to: dye twine using a fat Sharpie, glue it flat with clear-drying Elmer's glue, letter felt panels by hand while accepting that changing one word means redoing the whole panel, and improvise missing letters from other letters when working at three in the morning.
Where it succeeds and where it thins out
The class succeeds as a portrait of one artist's process and as permission-giving: it repeatedly tells the viewer that any piece of writing, a text message, a sixth-grade diary entry, is worthy material, and that failure and mess are part of the work. That message lands, and the final crafted poem about a dog's death, built from felt panels and dyed twine, is a genuinely moving payoff.
Where it thins out is in transferable method. The assignment ("make a visual story from something you wrote") is open enough to fit any skill level, but the class offers little structure for someone without Millman's design instincts to actually pace a multi-panel piece, choose a typeface mood, or judge when a layout works. Much of the crafting lesson is Millman narrating her own choices rather than teaching a repeatable process, and there is no digital or typographic-software path offered as an alternative to physical felt and twine. Anyone hoping for a structured design-thinking framework will find this looser and more anecdotal than that.
The standout
The editing rule to delete a personal story's opening explanatory sentence so readers experience the moment rather than being told about it in advance.
What you will learn
- How to select and edit personal writing (journal entries, texts, emails) into a tight visual-story source text
- The editing principle of cutting the throat-clearing first paragraph and any self-justifying language
- How to plan narrative structure and pacing across multiple panels or pages before making anything
- A working materials list for hand-lettered art: adhesive felt type, colored pencils, pastels, twine, vellum overlays
- The specific technique of dyeing twine with a Sharpie and gluing it flat with Elmer's glue for clean lines
- How to improvise missing letters by combining others (an upside-down V and F for a missing A)
Best for: Writers or designers who already keep journals or scraps of personal text and want a slow, materials-based way to turn one piece into a physical art object.
Skip it if: Anyone wanting a repeatable design process, digital workflow, or step-by-step technical skill rather than a loose studio walkthrough of one artist's personal habits.