Summary of chapter 14 of visual design solutions

  A good visual design cannot only decrease cognitive effort; it can also convey compatible meaning to viewers according to the designer’s purpose and communicate with them. In this case, we need think about how to enhance the meaning of content to achieve better communication.

  Designing based on common visual literacy can make a graphic more meaningful for viewers who have common visual language. We can use some imageries or icons with common accepted meanings which can be recognized and understood easily to promote efficiency of perceiving and semantic connecting.

  For example, many countries use red color as background of regulated boards for indicating dangerous meaning to facilitate people’s cognitive process because they have a previous perception and corresponding meaning stored for red color before. Here the red color which indicates danger is the common visual language for most people so that they can easily and effectively recognize and understand the red color. We need ensure that all aspects of visual representation like color are aligned with their intended meaning to avoid misunderstanding which called semantic coherence.

  As a type of analogy, visual metaphor works talentedly on persuading or making a memorable point. Just like that we always make a metaphor by connect things with similar features to help us understand and remember some difficult concepts, we can create visual metaphor to help viewers interpret the graphic in an easier way. For instance, we can compare a problem to the tip of an iceberg or compare embarking on a difficult project to a winding path through difficult terrain (page 264), the core point here is building the connection between unfamiliar concepts and physical elements to help viewers transfer their experience in the physical world to abstract concepts for better interpreting and memory.

  Besides making a memorable point, visual metaphor can also evoke emotion and capture attention. People always want to find relative association between two objects or events and mentally fit the key element into the pictorial metaphor to help them remember. So portraying the person with smoke blowing out of his head can effectively convey that a person is tense from overwork (page 259) and putting a wheel turning on a graphic to represent a repetitive procedure or relationship can easily attract viewers’ attention comparing to text depiction.

  Though the visual metaphor is extensively useful for enhancing meaning, we need ensure that the metaphor is clear and right for audience to perceive and the content of metaphor is appropriate for meaning conveying. In addition, we need avoid overusing on visual metaphor to maintain viewers’ interest and novelty.

  “Although we are surrounded by sensory input, we can only attend to and make sense of a small amount of it.” (page 265) In this case, we can break down a big chunk of content which has no hierarchical or sequential order into small pieces by creating text tables with distinct boundaries for them. For sequential information, we can split the whole entity into different meaningful units and rearrange them on an oriented timeline or create a layered graphic for them to make it clearer for reading.

  As mentioned before in other chapters, diagram is also an excellent way to enhance explanations that we can refer diagram as a schematized visual to represent objects and concepts by using distilled images and symbols (page 269). Diagram can explain the whole system of an object and show its parts or structure to make it more intuitive for viewers to understand and remember.

  And a phase diagram which includes series of static frames that convey the key stages of a dynamic event (page 274) can demonstrate the flow and movement to show the dynamic process of a whole event. We can use geometrical shapes to represent each component of a concept and show inner relationships through proximity by connecting lines to make abstract concepts concrete. Similarly, we can use dashed or dot lines to demonstrate how to do something by showing the trace of a motion or movement.