Visual Vocabulary

• When I first tried to use visual thinking techniques such as mind mapping, I had trouble drawing representative images for my ideas. Some images were easy, like if I needed an image to associate with “Home,” I would draw a little house. It was much more difficult with concepts. I would write “Learning” on a mind map and then struggle to come up with an image that represented that word. Now, I might draw an old-fashioned schoolhouse, or a blackboard, or even a pile of books, but it took effort to build that vocabulary.

• Building up your own visual vocabulary and being able to “read” images that others create is loosely known as visual literacy. One definition I found on Wikipedia was fairly clear: “Visual literacy is the ability to evaluate, apply, or create conceptual visual representations.” That’s what I struggled with: coming up with visual representations of concepts or ideas.

• Icons are the “words” in a visual vocabulary. In his book Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines an icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing or idea,” and he goes on to explain: “that’s a bit broader than the definition in my dictionary, but it’s the closest thing to what I need here. ’Symbol’ is a bit too loaded for me. The sorts of images we usually call symbols are one category of icon, however. These are the images we use to represent concepts, ideas and philosophies.”

• The kinds of icons that are most useful from a visual thinking and communicating perspective are pictorial: images designed to look like their subjects. But what does “learning” look like? That’s the trick. In order to come up with a picture for a concept, we need to try to relate that concept to some kind of experience and then translate that experience into a picture. In my earlier examples, I suggested icons that are related to learning like a schoolhouse or books. You could also think about the experience of learning as a kind of activity in your mind, and maybe show an outline of a head with gears inside, processing information. In this way, deciding on an icons actually helps us understand what we’re thinking in more depth.

• One way to build your visual vocabulary is to use a search engine like Google that indexes images. Search for “learning icon” for example, look at the image results, choose one that makes sense to you, and copy it. In some ways, icons are very personal, but there is also a universality about them that makes them meaningful to everyone. There are perhaps many icons you can choose for any one concept, so look for one (or invent it) that seems to embody the subtle nuance you’re trying to communicate to others. It’s much like choosing between synonyms in language: they mean basically the same thing, but they have subtle differences in feeling and meaning.

Therefore: