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The Confection Project

In Photoshop, design an image that visually summarizes, analyzes, and interprets a complex idea, theory, or extended narrative in a single eye span. The image should be designed to work as a particular visual genre: for example, as a postcard, an academic poster, a book illustration, an art work, etc.

In Chapter Seven of his book Visual Explanations, Edward Tufte provides numerous examples, and discusses the techniques and history this genre of analytical design, calling it a "visual confection."

Audience

You can assume the viewer of your confection is acquainted with the concept being visualized, having read the book or article or having taken the course from which the concept is taken. As Tufte observes, visual confections are based on ideas that have been elaborated in writing, and you should pick a topic that has been developed fully in words.

The design and details of your confection will serve to help the viewer to better remember the concept, to interpret it in a particular way, and to understand it more fully. Imagine students of the concept taping your confection above their desks, or propping a postcard of it against a coffee cup while studying, to remind and inspire them.

A Concept Visualized

Your confection should bring together words and images to visualize a complex idea: an argument, a multifaceted definition, a set of detailed choices to consider, the cause-and-effect relations in a process or story, and so on. This concept could be drawn from a book, magazine article, or online analysis.

It would be best to choose a concept 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 an interpretation of that narrative's meaning or structure, rather than just the plot. An album of music could be a concept if the songs (and their sequencing) suggest larger, interrelated ideas that constitute a unified whole.

It is not only permitted, but highly recommended, that you use someone's else's published analysis or interpretation for your visualization.

Genre

Conceive and design the image to work as a particular visual genre and for a particular audience: that is as a poster (popular or academic), as a postcard, bookmark, frontispiece or poster-insert for a book, illustration for a magazine article, etc.

Confections Are Not Collages

Tufte advises us to 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. See the many examples in Tufte's Chapter 7.

Commentary

You will write a commentary for this project to be turned in the class meeting after you have submitted the project. In addition to following the general guidelines for excellent commentaries, the Confection Commentary should

  1. usefully quote and cite Tufte at least twice

  2. compare or contrast your confection to some aspect of at least three other confections, either from the Tufte book or from the examples in class.

What is a "Concept"?

Examples of "concepts" can sometimes be identified by certain key kinds of words. See the italicized terms in the examples below:

Resources, Examples & Possible Non-Examples: