Form-giving (esp. Diagrams)

Form-giving. Bringing ideas to life. It’s a unique skill that professionals known for their creativity (designers, architects etc) bring to the table. There are various artifacts created as a result of this form-giving: napkin sketches, whiteboard drawings, diagrams, wireframes, blueprints and so on.

Out of all these, I’ve been especially always fascinated by diagrams. The way it enables us to comunicate complex ideas through creating shapes and flows with visuals (rectangle, square, triangle etc) and structure (tree, circle, flow etc) is incredible and efficient, and it also gives us room for getting creative and adding personal flair with styles.

Good diagrams should have these three different layers of visualization:

• “The icon”: By this I mean the general shape of the diagram. It should be iconic, to the extent that people should be able to remember its shape, just like when people see a silhouette of curvy bottle they immediately think of Coca-Cola. Great diagrams already achieved this status (eg. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Venn Diagram, Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, The Periodic Table, Calendar)
• “The structure (hierarchy / flow)”: The diagram should have either a hierarchy (to communicate what it’s made of) or flow (to communicate how it works), sometimes both. This should be revealed when the viewer decides to pay more attention to the diagram, with a proper level of visual emphasis.
• “The details”: The details of each element in the diagram and of how they’re connected (via hierarchy or flow) should be revealed when the viewer decides to pay even closer attention to the diagram, again with a proper level of visual emphasis that’s only readable with close attention.