Do you ever struggle to find the perfect description when trying to convey an idea? Like a foggy picture, adjectives and modifiers fail to depict what's in your mind. Illustrators often face a similar challenge, especially when attempting to explain complex and difficult concepts. Sometimes the imagery is intangible or way too complicated to explain with a picture. Although complex information could be relayed using charts and stats, this could get pretty boring. Instead, just like when writing an essay to describe, for example, emotions, illustrators can use visual metaphors to bring to life difficult concepts. Just as a written metaphor is a description that relates one object to another, a visual metaphor uses imagery to suggest a particular association or point of similarity. Our lesson "Big Data" is a great example of a situation where visual metaphors played a huge role in explaining the concept. What is Big Data in the first place? Good question! Big Data is a huge amount of digital information produced worldwide on a daily basis, challenging us to find solutions for storing, analyzing, and also imagining it visually. Quite an elusive concept! How should we depict this? Let's take a look at our "Big Data" script. We start with smaller computer servers that branch out into bigger networks to produce data, then even bigger networks and production of even more data. You see where we're going with this -- an object growing and branching out in many directions and producing something as a result? Does that remind you of something? Just like those computer networks, a tree grows and branches out to produce more leaves each year. And every year, just as the data accumulates and faces us with a challenge to find storage solutions, it gets harder to collect those piles of leaves when they fall off the tree. Aha! There's our visual metaphor! Okay, so we have the script, audio, and a visual metaphor. The next step in visual development is to design the characters and environments of the animation. To do so, we think of an appropriate and appealing style to illustrate the ideas and help the viewer better understand what they're hearing. Let's go back to the script and see if we can find any clues there. Our story starts in the 1960s when the first computer networks were built. This decade will serve as a good point to make the stylistic choice for our animation as it will allow us to refer to artwork from that era. You may want to start by looking at some art books (design, illustrations, cartoons, etc.) from that era and find a style that may our own purpose. Look closely, study the material, and try to understand the choices artists of that time made and why. For example, the 1960s minimalist animation style was a significant departure from the cinematic realism that was popular in animated films at the time. The choice to use limited animation techniques was originally made for budgetary reasons, but it became a signature style that influenced many future generations of animators. In this stylistic approach, the simplified characters, flat backgrounds, and angular shapes come together to create new interpretations of reality, which also sounds like a good place to begin visualizing our own Big Data. Well, let's try an experiment. "In the 1980s islands of similar networks speaking different dialects sprung up all over Europe and the States, making remote access possible but tortuous." Is this better? "In the 1980s islands of similar networks speaking different dialects sprung up all over Europe and the States, making remote access possible but tortuous. To make it easy for our physicists across the world to access the ever-expanding Big Data stored at CERN without traveling, the networks needed to be talking with the same language." As you probably observed, graphic representations are a great way to capture the interest of your audience. By depicting what you want to present and explain with strong, memorable visuals, you can communicate your idea more effectively. So, now, challenge yourself. Think of an abstract concept that cannot be explained with simple words. Go ahead and try your hand at visually developing that idea.
