20 beautiful examples of “Snowfall” style interactive storytelling

Maxine Sherrin 19th July, 2013 @maxine

Yesterday an article on Medium, Snowfallen, caught my eye. It’s about a technique for presenting longform writing online, by embellishing it with integrated multimedia elements, gorgeous photography, infographics and so on. It’s like taking an article that might have appeared as a slab of 7500 words in The New Yorker, and giving it the kind of treatment you would expect in National Geographic or Scientific American. The writer of the article is asking whether for all the razzle-dazzle, anyone actually reads the writing, which is fair enough. But in these TL;DR days when long form writing needs all the help it can get, surely it’s worth the experiment.

So if you get the chance to have a bit of fun with doing something like this yourself, here’s 20 beautiful examples for your inspiration!

Snow Fall

This was the site that started it all, thus the name for the style, “snowfalling”.

Daft Punk Random Access Memories feature at Pitchfork

Bat for Lashes feature at Pitchfork

Firestorm

This Guardian story about the Tasmanian bush fires really pushes the limits of what is primarily a reading experience, as opposed to watching and listening.

Dock Ellis

The Web Video Problem

This site has a slightly different agenda to the others. Rather than being educational, it’s trying to convince you of a point of view: another type of site that it might be fun to use the technique with.