And another brief detour to The Hannibal Blog‘s older but ongoing thread on the art of story-telling.

I’ve already featured stories high and low, old and new, conventional and zany, but one insight emerging recently (when I highlighted the storytelling inside an ad), was that stories are ubiquitous and inescapable. It is how we humans make sense of stuff.

So look at this explanation, which is really a sort of story, of the credit crisis:

This is the product of Jonathan Jarvis, who did this as part of his graduate thesis at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. As Jonathan says,

The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated.

So for him the story-telling principle of simplicity reigns supreme, although, as you can see, he also made sure to depict (subtly, cheekily and cartoonishly) character and scene and plot. As Ira Glass might say, right from the start, the viewer senses that

something is about to occurr, …. [that things are] heading in a direction …. raising and answering questions … [and that we] can’t get out.

Well done, Jonathan.