In Photoshop, create an image that visually summarizes and analyzes a complex idea, theory, or extended narrative in a single eye span. The image could to serve as a frontispiece or poster-insert for a book, as an academic poster, or as an artistic rendering of a concept. Edward Tufte's Chapter 7 from Visual Explanations discusses the techniques and history this genre of visual rhetoric,calling it a visual confection.
Audience
You can assume the viewer of your confection has read the book and is acquainted with the concept being visualized. Your confection should serve to help the viewer better to remember it, and to understand it more fully, by studying the design and details of your visualization at length. Imagine students of the concept taping your poster, frontispiece, or artwork above their desks to enable them to remind and inspire them.
A Concept Visualized
Your confection should bring together words and images to visualize a complex set of ideas: an argument, a multifaceted definition, a set of detailed choices, the cause-and-effect relations in a process or story, and so on. This concept could be drawn from your major, a book, an album of music (especially a "concept album"), etc. An "analytical concept" is
an abstract idea or general phenomenon broken down into its component parts that are elaborated in their dynamic relations for the purpose of explanation or memory.
Examples of "concepts" can sometimes be identified by certain key kinds of words (bolded below):
- Greg Ulmer's Theory of the Manifesto,
- Hayden White's "Narrative of Discovery,"
- Winifred Gallagher's explanation (following Grant Hildebrand) of why some buildings appeal more to us than others.
- Anthony Easthope's distinction between Iconic and Elaborated Discourses.
- Max Weber's The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
- Richard Slotkind's Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860
It would be best to choose a concept that has been fully elaborated in a published book, article, or narrative, and that you personally know and find interesting and useful. A novel, movie, or television series could also serve as a "concept" if your confection is visualizing the narrative's meaning, rather than just the plot.
Confection vs. Collage
Avoid creating a simple collage, which combines images in suggestive but diffusely intended ways. Instead, aim at producing what Tufte calls a "miniature theatre of information" that makes "reading and seeing and thinking identical" (138, 151).
Image(s) Should Dominate
Your confection may include some supplemental text, but the explanatory weight should be carried mostly by the confection itself, which should be one (perhaps multifaceted) image.
- Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief
- Radiohead's album cover for Hail to the Thief (confections or collage?)
- Beethoven and Romanticism
- The Useful Milkweed Plant
- more about Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy
