The Power Of the Metaphor
All too often, when people are trying to do the right thing by creating a strong visual to represent an idea, they fall back on the literal meaning of the word. This often makes it very difficult to find the right image to convey the idea and will often result in a visual that seems forced.
Take for example, the concept of the “Open Government Initiative.” The application in this case was a blog, but I thought to myself, “what if we were tasked with creating slides for a presentation discussing this initiative?” The ideas came flowing in and they were all very left-brain type of visuals; that is very literal:
- The White House
- Flags
- Person at a computer
- Open doors
- Open windows
When attempting to come up with visuals for your message, try first assembling a list of synonyms. From there, add a series of different types of metaphors that can represent the idea. For example, for “open,” thesaurus.com gives us:
accessible, agape, airy, ajar, bare, clear, cleared, dehiscent, disclosed, emptied, expanded, expansive, exposed, extended,extensive, free, gaping, made passable, naked, navigable, passable, patent, patulous, peeled,removed, rent, revealed, ringent, rolling,spacious, spread out, stripped, susceptible, unbarred, unblocked, unbolted, unburdened, uncluttered, uncovered, unfolded, unfurled, unimpeded, unlocked, unobstructed, unplugged, unsealed, unshut, unstopped, vacated, wide, yawning
How about some metaphors? Well, these come to mind:
- sky
- open hands
- doorway
- passageway
- portal
Other concepts central to the initiative include:
- collaboration
- transparency
- information
- participation
- feedback
- government
- opportunities
- public
Generate a list of synonyms from that and add to those concepts these metaphors:
- petition
- conversation
- clear water
- bulletin board
- etc.
Do you see what we’ve done here? From one simple message, we have ourselves one heck of a list of words we can use to search our favorite stock photo site and/or Creative Commons library to find the image that will help us drive our point home.
Below is a small deck with some examples of using some of these metaphors to strengthen the message visually:
