This image results from the Java storyboarding applet presented below. Use something like this with your own images to produce a storyboard online!

"It starts with Leonardo da Vinci's using cartoons to illustrate his ideas. Centuries later cartooning was revitalized by Walt Disney to evaluate ideas for movies and animated cartoons. Disney... saw that storyboarding could be adapted effectively for business planning in a mode they termed 'displayed thinking.'"

This technique could be useful if there's reason to believe your audience would respond better to a flow of images than to text -- some writers think that young people (e.g. the "MTV Generation") are increasingly like that.

What distinguishes storyboarding from regular PowerPoint or viewgraph presentations is the use of an integrated graphics design (i.e. cartoons) for entertainment value and to emphasize common or continuous elements that need (for that particular case) to be emphasized.

A definition from programming/Web design:

A cartoon strip or series of thumbnail sketches representing successive screen contents and output media, section divisions and relationships, and navigation links.

A design checklist for a programmer's storyboarding task:

• Evaluate needs
• Decide on multimedia (or not)
• Define scope
• Brainstorming
• Assess production resources
• Assess content resources
• Determine cost
• Prepare flowchart
• Prepare storyboard!
• Programming
• Testing

Design elements for nearly all applications include:

1. Sequencing
2. Visuals
3. Framing
4. Storytelling
5. Displayed thinking
6. Compressed ideas
7. Universally understood language

A student applied a handful of paste-up sketches to show a "before-after" scenario for a problem she was intending to solve. Her idea and execution were brilliant in that nobody else used such a strategy (most other students gravitate to PowerPoint), but her sketches were difficult to see, especially from the back of the room. (Sketching is often a weak point with students.)

Storyboarding tends to be used by the "artsy" folks, because you need a fairly high level of artistic ability in order to make a comprehensible storyboard.

This does not mean that storyboarding is inaccessible to engineers. Lectures can always be enhanced with all sorts of animations and graphics, and even if we wish we had greater artistic ability, computers and clip-art make it at least possible for us to be understood. One engineer writes:

...when discussing the z-transform, Zorro often appears to ask a question or point something out. I use a graphic of a transformer (toy) when discussing FFTs, a graphic of father time (one student thought it was the grim reaper, so I told him that figure would appear on the final) for time-invariance and causality, etc. The students seem to pay more attention, or at least they perk up when one of the figures appears--particularly if the figure has not appeared before. Some might call it cheap theatrics, but I do what I need to do.

Below is a storyboarding Java applet, which can accommodate individualized images. The applet's operating rules are:

1. Images are constrained to 32x32 pixels.
2. They're organized loosely into four columns, intended to represent characters, actions, locations, and props.
3. Any number of these images can be dragged elsewhere in the applet space.
4. A line may be drawn to connect two critical images.
5. A comment may be added in the textbox.
6. Once the storyboard is ready, print it out or save it to an image file, then start over!

References

Wallace, M. "The Story of Storyboarding."
"The Art of Storyboarding."
Forsha, H. Show Me. American Society for Quality, 1994. ISBN 0-873-89255-0
Fraioli, J. __. Storyboarding 101. Michael Wiese Productions, 2000. ISBN 0-941-18825-6