How to Draw Invisible Programming Concepts

original article by maggie appleton: https://maggieappleton.com/drawinginvisibles1

context/notes

this article is one to revisit often when thinking about metaphors and visual communication/illustration.

it's worth it to read it as a whole. my highlights below are most useful for my own personal use sometime in the future.

my highlights:

How do you draw a thing that's not a thing?

How do you take a fuzzy-edged, evolving cultural concept like “Web Security,” and condense it down to a single image?

The answer, in short, is a mix of cultural symbols and visual metaphor. Though there's a little more to it than that.

Good, meaningful illustration works in four layers. I like to think of it as a cake.

You start with a solid base of visual metaphor. Add on a layer of clear, well-constructed drawing. Then you think about designing an aesthetically pleasing composition with gestalt principles. And finally you throw fancy lighting and pretty colors over the top.

Metaphors are fundamental to how we visualise anything that's a non-physical, abstract idea.

So, what's a Metaphor?

A metaphor is when we understand one thing in terms of another.

The power of metaphor is it helps us use something we know to understand something we don't know.

Beyond just being useful for learning complex concepts, and framing old ideas in new ways, metaphor is the basis of nearly every thought we have. It's a fundamental building block of human cognition that shapes the way we perceive and interact with the world

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