How To Turn A Rough Diagram Into On-Brand Visual Storytelling

You can love a website’s look and feel and still have no idea how to recreate it without losing your voice. We start with that exact problem, then pull the camera back to the real issue: most business communication breaks because it ignores story. Once you see every slide, web page, proposal, and email as a hero’s journey, you stop dumping information and start guiding people through uncertainty toward a clear future state.

We walk through the classic arc (status quo, rising action, free fall, determination, return) and why it shows up in everyday life and high-stakes leadership decisions. Prospects aren’t just comparing options; they’re managing risk, protecting their reputation, and looking for a plan they can defend internally. When you bake the rules of story into your value proposition and visual communication, the message “clicks” because it matches how the brain already organizes meaning and emotion.

Then we get practical with Google NotebookLM (Notebook LM). We show how to build a source-grounded knowledge base, why “gold in, gold out” matters, and how a master prompt can carry your brand style guide, colors, and tone across everything you generate. You’ll hear the iterative process in real time: first outputs that miss the mark, tighter prompts and better sources, and revisions that turn technical labels into human language that communicates feeling. The payoff is a repeatable workflow for creating on-brand slide decks, web page sections, and supporting visuals that make your story easier to understand and harder to forget.

If you want clearer messaging, stronger storytelling, and visuals that support your narrative instead of fighting it, subscribe, share the episode with a teammate, and leave a review. What are you trying to create right now: a deck, a proposal, or a web page?

Transcript

A Website Style Worth Copying

SPEAKER_01 0:01

All right. The other day I saw a website I liked. Looks like this. I really like the feel. I like these lines, this handwritten drawn. I like the contrasting colors. I think it's excellent. It shows it shows a lot of personality. It has this confidence in the feel. And um anyway, I was I was like, hey, I've got this graphic, and I won't, I wonder if I can get my graphic to have this look and feel. This is a particular style guide, right? But I don't know what the name of it is. So how do I get my image that looks like this? A story arc. This is cute. It conveys a message, it it demonstrates our hero's journey. Do you know every page hat tells a story? Every presentation, every email, every web page, every um uh slide, there's a story arc in it. If you're not an expert storyteller, oftentimes your your efforts at creating or telling whatever it is that you need to present in a meeting, in a sales call, it might fall short because you're not an expert storyteller. Here, if we look in the steps of story, we have a um we have someone in the status quo. They're they're running along. They're this is you, this is you today. You got up and you're having coffee, and then you got a you um got an idea, or maybe you're out to to go and and uh run some errands, or you're gonna go out and take care of something. You're gonna go to work, you got a project, you're kind of looking forward to it, and then you get into it and you realize there's these unknowns that you didn't expect, and then you're you're caught in this. I didn't expect this. What am I doing? Why did I even decide that or think that I could do this? You get here, and you're like, what? And the why didn't I just leave things alone? But then you get determined, you get a plan, you work the plan, and then you you overcome it. You overcome this. So we've we've we've we've made this, we've gone through all these emotions, and then we're back in our new status quo. This happens in with you in relationships, this happens with just brushing your teeth, this happens when you talk to your kids or or whatever. You today, if I was to ask you, where are you at the moment in your particular role? Your role as a husband or a wife, your role as a uh a parent, your role as uh in your your um profession, your role as as a yard working in the yard. You can probably pick where you are in your journey at that moment. You you go through this in many phases, every day, many times, and just just your roles or your tasks. Yeah, this is me uh going to Lowe's, like, oh, I'm I'm gonna replace that faucet. Um that's easy. Even a even someone like me can do it. And I go to Lowe's, I get to stuff, and I get back and I go, oh, I forgot. I forgot I need this washer, and then I'm going back and I'm going, why didn't I just call someone to do this? Because now I've gone back and forth to Lowe's three times now, and I got the wrong washer. And what am I thinking? I don't work on these all the time, and then I finally I get her done, I get it set up, I wash my hands. All right, I did it, I did it, and then here I am. And then then it's like, oh, the garage door didn't go up. And so this is this is the hero's journey. But when you think about if you're you're a leader of a business, you you have a solution, you designed a solution for your your the folks that uh your prospects, your customers, etc. Well, guess where they are in this journey when they run into your solution, they're like, Oh, I I have um I have this issue, so I'm gonna do some investigation. Yeah, run into the potential options. Oh, there's a lot of options. I don't, I don't know which the best option. And then they've hopefully they find you, and assuming you help them see where your solution fits in their future, then this is where they go. You move them from somewhere in this part of the story to here, and then they see the plan that you have for them, and then they're happy they picked you, and then here they go. All right, and so when you're designing your communications for it, your proposal, your sales proposal, your your meeting, your website page, your instruction manual, whatever that is, you need to consider where your people are in this journey and then it designed this. So here we are, back to what I was wanting to do. I saw this look and feel, and I go, I want to, I want to change this to look more like this style. Okay, so first first in Notebook LM, what I love about Notebook LM is that notebook LM naturally gets this story arc. You don't even have to tell it, it's already pre-programmed, and so notebook LM is described as learn anything, but I feel it's more of a communicate anything, and it naturally formats everything in the style of a story. The the rules of story. This is uh Joseph Campbell Campbell's uh hero's journey right here. And so the rules of story mean that your content, if it's designed in a particular way, the person that's hearing that or seeing that information, it will click because it's formatted to honor the rules of story. Somewhere in presenting and it's describing what you do, you have to bake in the rules of story in order for it to be resonate. Okay, and if you're not a natural storyteller, you haven't been trained in this, then most often this is the result of what you're trying to communicate that it misses the mark. So, an example, I go into notebook lm, I give it this. Um, I give it this image, and I say, design me an improved version of how of this this uh basic graphic. Okay, and this is what it spits out, and so this is demonstrating how it innately understands the flow of story. Okay, so here we are. The journey begins at the guarded static baseline representing the initial status quo. And so we're we're guarded, and and then after we make a call, make a decision, we descend. It's called the descent into doubt. And this is where the character hits their lowest emotional, and then they they get determined, they do the work, and then they overcome it. This is the fulfilling thing about life that we're doing this all the time, and no matter how hard it is, when we get here, we have this emotion, and then we're at a new baseline. We've we've learned something, we we've returned at a better state. But back to my my desire. I want it, I want it to look like this. I want this to look like this. But notebook LM is going to present it to me based on best guess, but you can see innately understands and excels at the story arc. All right, so now what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna share my screen. I'm gonna show you how I use notebook LM to learn and go through that go through that same journey here. I was like preparing, and guess where I ended up a couple of times, but being determined, here we go. So here we go. We're going to tab window. Just make sure I'm landing in the butt. Bear with me. Show time. No, this is not where we want to be. All right.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Here we go.

Master Prompts Style Guides And Brand Colors

First Outputs When The Thesis Fails

Iterating Toward Web-Ready Visuals

Revising Slide Text For Emotion

SPEAKER_01 10:10

All right. So here we are in Notebook LM. If you haven't been in Notebook LM, it's a free tool, it's a storytelling tool, and you just go to notebook lm.google.com, you sign up and you get going, and you have notebooks and you create these notebooks. So we're popping into this notebook today. The beautiful thing about notebook LM, if you haven't been um following along in my uh series, you can go back and see. But right here is the most important piece of notebook LM. This is where we're going to put our information that we want to use to help us tell our story. And so in this case, I brought in that image that I showed you. I pulled it in as an image. I just added it to the source. The way you do that is you just come in and you upload files, you just click on this, pick the files, or you put websites or from your Google Drive, or you paste text in here. The beautiful thing about this is when you give it an assignment or you want to discuss, it only looks here. It's not going to go out on the internet and make stuff up. So this is going to only be based on what you're asking it to focus on. So this is huge. This is called your knowledge base. This is the uh leverage. This is your this is your pro tip. When you bring stuff in here, then you're going to get, you know, you've heard garbage in, garbage out. Well, this is where gold in, gold out. Okay, so you're gonna add your come in, add your gold. What what does that mean? It means that you vetted and approved this message and this content, and you put it in here, and now you've you're can be more confident about what's going to happen. In my hero's journey for this episode, I came in here and my premise was I'm going to put in the very specific expectations of what I want the output to be in this. This is your master prompt. You can customize it, and you come in here and you can put in what your expectations, expectations of everything globally that happens in this notebook is going to follow, adhere to, um, honor. Okay. And so I went and I did some research on that image that I showed you, that good looking. And I went to Gemini and I asked Gemini, I said, Hey Gemini, describe to me the look and feel of this. And it gave me that information. Well, I brought that information with the intent that um I would bring in here. And so it's brought in here, it said the core aesthetic was a high performance, secure, and develop developer-centric technical minimalist. It uses high contrast accents to guide the eye through complex data flows. And so I put it all in here, including the um um color, the color um codes. And what I did is I went and got my color codes from my website and I modified it so that would follow my brand color codes. That's what I wanted, and I wanted to adapt that style. And so my my premise, my thesis was that if I put this in the custom instructions, then it would accomplish what I was thinking. So, next I brought in that screenshot, and then I asked the uh tool to evaluate the screenshot and explain it to me. And then it went through and it provided a breakdown of that screenshot. So, it what did I do? I said, Hey, look at this and explain the hero's journey here. So, it this is the output that it gave based on this image. Okay, it went through and explained each step. Module one, initial initialization, status quo, and launch, node one. This is calling this node one, nodes two and three right here. The ascension, the subject commits to the action path, moving upward with initial optimism, and then it's it even says, you know, the source that it's referring to. It's only one source, so it's all always going to have one. Um, node four is the free fall, the trajectory experiences a severe negative drop. The character node exhibits panic and lost control, so it really dissected just the image and organized it. And so I said, All right, save this as a note, and then I brought that note over. You can take a note. You see this architecture of the hero's journey. This is a note, it saved. Once it's over here, you can bring that note to over as a source. So I did that. I brought these over as a source. Why did I do that? The reason that I'm doing that is I'm going to initiate a slide, generate a slide based to demonstrate and explain the architecture of the hero arc. Okay. So it did that. All right. So I put these sources over here, and now I have these sources that are very concentrated, they're accurate, they're exactly what uh informed off that original screenshot. That's it. Plus the custom prompt of how I'm wanting the look and feel and the style guide of the generation of these images. So we got that going for us. All right. Now, over here, I had uh several conversations and I generated several sources in this chat bot. And this chat bot did exhibit um, did did um create oh some instructions, or it reflected, it reflected um the style guide from the master prompt and its explanation. You can see this being demonstrated here. Okay, so then my next premise was um that I would come over here, I would generate a source, generate one of these um assignments here, and so I was expecting the master prompt to put out exactly what based on that flow. So the first source was this, what I showed you. Well, then nowhere near that original image of that website. I looked. Okay, so where did I end up in the journey? I was going like, all right, uh that my thesis didn't work. What do I need to what do I need to work on here? That was my first output. And this in this assignment, I had two sources that it pulled from. And this was the prompt that I asked, retell the story as a graphic novel. All right. Well, I expected that it's going to be in my brand style and colors, and that it would have that look and feel and fail. All right. So where did I end up? I was in ending up here. My my expectation of notebook LM helping me tell the story and the look and feel that I liked, I was here. Okay. But I see some promise. We've got some, we've got some stuff, but nowhere near what I expected. Okay. So then I came back, and my prompt was all right, retell the story as follows, and then I put the actual master prompt information in here, and it was based on uh one source. And I'm not exactly clear on what what source I picked. I think it was one of the yeah, the art, the architecture of the hero arc. So it was this one. So now let's look at this. We're looking at, all right, we're getting better, we're getting closer. We can see my colors, but it's still very technical. And I that's from my prompt. Okay, but if I was wanting, and my intent from all of this was I'd love to take that that messy little squirrel graphic, this graphic over here, and I want to make a web page that would feel good, and I need good images for that web page, and that page needs to flow in what a story arc. Okay, so now I started to get some pretty good or some images along the lines. We're getting there in our hero's journey. So, where where are we? We're in this determination stage, we're past this stage, and we're starting to get some traction. We're getting, you know, the colors are coming in. I'm starting to get somewhat of my vision. But you see, then you see what's going on here. So, all right, this is pretty good, but it's not there, it's not there yet. So, my next my next version was this. Okay, we're still not there. I don't like these characters, but they still convey, it's a little messy, but here I am. All right, I'm just not there. Not there. So I asked, okay, let's go back. Let's get a let's get all right. So an infographic, my prompt, my prompt was a little more clear on the colors and expectations and the technical. So now we're getting close. This this is closer, it's got some explanation, but now we have the bones of a web page. But look, we got our brand colors, we got the color, we're getting close to where that original image is, and we've got the emotions reflected. I think it's really awesome how Notebook LM really excels at communicating emotion. And I'm in a presentation, in a in in a um meeting, you know, the to be able to visually augment or complement your text or your your voice images really help the brain connect the dots to the concept and to nail the emotion. Point of that story is really powerful. This is a comic book. You know, as a kid, we were exposed to comics, um funnies and the paper, and then obviously um on TV, you see this native in everything. So then I took, I took that, I took the um improvement or and then again I said explain each step in this image. The image was just the the image that I uploaded from the the squirrel picture, right? And then I said follow these explanations. Now we're getting somewhere. This is not necessary, but imagine, if you will, you want to design a web page. Now we're getting somewhere. It has that look and feel, it's got that grid behind it, and and these are nice and they're closer. Imagine being able to take these images and communicate it to your graphic design person. Now you've really set them up for success to communicate more clearly on what your expectations are. There's some really good graphics that can be even screenshotted and used, and used in various um yeah, leave behinds, emails, uh, social media posts, etc. All right. But here, here I really liked this one. Now it doesn't have the squirrel, but originally, originally, remember that inform that uh webpage I showed you. This is starting to clearly, it's starting to be a better representation of what I was wanting. It's getting closer. You can see the journey we made here. I wanted, I wanted more of the the glow, I wanted the line to show where we're moving from here to there. I wanted it to give energy, I wanted to be technical, I wanted it to be in my brand colors. And now we're getting very close. So, what do we have here? We've got the bones of a great web page. Imagine a web page, you you have a header, then you as you scroll down, what is it? It's basically a scrolling slide show. Okay, and you can communicate your concepts. Notice that the the images over on the left, here's our our main line, and then here's the explanation on the right of that image, and then the next one, it's put the image on the right and the explanation on the left, and again the title or the header of this particular next flow of the web page. So it's there's a lot of things going on here that didn't have to explain that it gets natively, but let's say I don't like this text. We're getting close. So let's notebook LM allows me to revise these. So I made some revision. Um, and I'm copying and pasting them in the um essence of time and so you don't have to watch me misspell everything. But maybe I want to say instead of establishing the initial baseline, I want it to say the uncomfortable truth, realizing the status quo is in jeopardy. And so I can take this and revise, generate a revised deck. So I can go through and put in my revisions for each of these slides. So in this case, I want it to be less technical, the friction of ascension. I'm I want it to say seizing the initiative. All right, and then I'm gonna go over here and I'm just gonna do three of these and let it regenerate about what we're doing. So instead of engineering the system shot shock, let's put the weight of leadership. What have I done? Okay, all right, now I'm gonna generate this revised deck. So it's quickly going through those revisions. Now it's while it's um in the oven baking, let's say that I on this one here. I like I like certain parts of this and not everything. I've got the bones that I can copy, I can do a screenshot and just take out the pieces that I like, take it over and modify these. Or the person that you're assigning that's helping you, you've given a very clear explanation. You've already got the story baked in it. You're there helping you do the last five percent, which are the little tweaks and the styles, and so notebook lm again, that story arc, the story isn't everything that you're working with. And notebook LM again puts you in a position to where you can just clearly define what's in your head, but not be caught up in all the frustrating parts of your journey when you're yeah, when you're you don't want to be the squirrel here, you don't want to spend your time prepping for your presentations in this area. You you're wanting to be here because at the end, when you show up with these um assets, these visual story arc-telling assets, you're able to commend.

High-Stakes Leadership And Customer Risk

SPEAKER_00 28:33

So let's look at our revisions here. All right, so you can see the uncomfortable truth realizing the status quo is in jeopardy, but then seizing the initiative, the weight of leadership.

SPEAKER_01 28:49

What have I done? Okay, this is you see how it communicates the feeling in the in the story of journey, uh you know, the journey that you go through every day, what's happening is an internal struggle, and it's generally self-doubt that the decision you made, the journey, the path you picked, um, you you have to fight this little part of the journey. You got to get past that mentally, right? So that you can get on to the next steps that you really intended when you begin. And so No Book Elium helps you build out your brand architecture, clearly communicate that value proposition, gives you an operational visual roadmap. Not only helps you get the text right, but gets the visuals to support or augment or and get you here, get you to this place where you initially intended when you thought, all right, my VIPs that I work with, they started using Notebook LM. We've got it tuned in. Guess what? You know, my team can help them do this, but guess what they do?

SPEAKER_00 30:05

They get in this and they do the revisions, and this is where they spend most of their time because they know exactly what they want to communicate. They desire it to be on brand, on voice, uh, you know, honoring their brand style guide, etc. But they're going into high-stakes conversations prepared and with confidence because they've got a tool that helps them uh fully communicate the value and the aspirational, you know, put their solution in their aspirational future of their hero. And so they're able to get here, but more importantly, they're able to take their client from I don't know about your solution, I'm considering it, but this is a risk. If I'm my reputation's at risk if I pick you guys and you fail, and I have to argue or defend my position, why I chose to go with your solution. So this is what I need. I need to see a plan and a clear path and a roadmap on how you're gonna help me and my team, my company, my whoever they're leading, whoever they're wanting to support. So they want to get here, they want to get to an upgraded future. They want to move from the status quo to the place in the future through that messy.

Like Subscribe And Getting Help

SPEAKER_01 31:36

So no book lm. It's a way to get yourself through this journey, get that vision or something you like, get it more than just hey, that's good enough, and end up in the right area. Hey, if you like what's going on here, like and subscribe. Be sure to share and uh let me know apply to this. Hey, we got this QR code. If you want to, if you want to help some help doing this, if you want to get your team um trained on how to do this, that's what I do. All right, kids. We'll see you on the next episode of AI Made Simple. We'll keep walking through many of the ways that Notebookellium sets you up as a great person to lead your prospects, your team, your organization to the path that they envision. AI Made Simple. That's a wrap.