Visual Analogy for a Confection Background

Choose one concept from the activity Confection Concepts: Getting Started

Imagine that you are going to create a confection to help people understand and remember that concept. Deciding on a background would be one of the first steps.

Why Backgrounds Matter So Much
First, consider how backgrounds serve visually to suggest meaning in these sample projects:

• Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief
• Evolution/Creationism Debate
• Beethoven and Romanticism
• Food Pyramid

Whether you plan to use an imagined scene, compartments, or a hybrid of the two strategies, the background you choose is a powerful tool for conveying a vision of how the parts of the idea relate or work together.

Directions
Take a sheet of paper and, with a pencil or pen, divide a sheet of paper into four quadrants.

In each space, try drawing a different pattern or scheme for a background that would organize the parts of the idea in meaningful ways. Once you draw the background, try writing in words or drawing small icons to represent the parts against that background. Do that for each of the backgrounds you try.

Which background of your four is most effective at expressing how the idea is shaped--how it moves or unfolds?

Resources
Try looking at the Periodic Table of Visualization for ideas. If you use any of these schemes as models, be sure to label your drawing with the name and element symbol.

Also, you can look to the physical world for analogies. Does your idea work like a road, a cold front, a telephone system, a waterfall, etc.?

Self Analysis
I will provide an online activity for analyzing your own work later.