VISUAL techniques for depicting qualities include direct labels (for example, the numerically labeled grids of statistical graphics, or, at left, dimensional tripods in architectural drawings); encodings (color scales); and self-representing scales (objects of known size appearing in an image).
“info-graphics” (the language is as ghastly as the charts)
“Stripes are dazzling, sometimes hypnotic, usually happy. . . . Stripes attract attention. . . . The stripes of the IBM logo serve primarily as an attention-getting device. They take commonplace letters out of the realm of the ordinary. They are memorable. They suggest efficiency and speed.” . . . Stripes suggest dazzle or deft speed when allied with a magic trick or computers but something else when marking the uniforms of military officers or prisoners.
In The Flying Glass of Water, changes in position of the disembodied hands, the rising background grid, and the FLYING letters altogether loosely signal left-to-right flow, reinforcing the already understood direction of reading at least in left-right conventions of the occidental world.
Ghosting of multiple images, like blurring, can signal motion in pictorial descriptions.
Your audience should know beforehand what you are going to do; then they can evaluate how your verbal and visual evidence supports your arguments. . . .
Near the beginning of your presentation, tell the audience:
What the problem is
Why the problem is important
What the solution to the problem is. . . .
Unlike magicians, you should give your audience a second chance to get the point. And a third, Repeated variations on the same theme will often clarify and develop and idea.
To explain complex ideas or data, use the method of PGP:
Particular General Particular . . .
To mask the optical information that would reveal their methods, magicians systematically reduce our ability to resolve their movement. In contrast, you should give high-resolution talks that are clear and also rich in content. Seek to maximize the rate of information transfer to your audience.
Good form is clear but not a spectacle.
And a confection is an assembly of many visual events, selected (at the red dots, for example) from various Streams of Story, then brought together and juxtaposed on the still flatland of paper. By means of a multiplicity of image-events, confections illustrate an argument, present and enforce visual comparisons, combine the real and the imagined, and tell us yet another story.