Graphics Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 2.
Your Visual Response: A Metaphor for Someone's Traits
You may now want to create a visual metaphor that shows someone's individual features. It could be thought provoking to draw a few sketches
of some people that are familiar or in close friendship, and then draw a self-portrait (a quick sketch), trying to emphasize your traits you
consider most characteristic of your personality. Devise metaphors for some features you are going to characterize in portraits you are going
to draw, such as youth or old age, frailty, fidelity, sophistication, refinement, harshness in relation to others, etc. Create visual metaphors
of these concepts by drawing simple symbols that characterize the person you are going to portray and include them into your portraits.
The use of suitable metaphor is crucial for
successful program visualization. Metaphors
that often serve visualization purposes include
solar systems, video games, nested boxes, a city,
house, parking lot, metro, library, street, and also
facial expression. It seems clearly visible that the
engineering-oriented research and inquiry have
been focused mostly on the spatially referenced,
time-dependent data. The choice of the type of
metaphor used for data visualization depends on
the kind of connections existing between the data,
and defines the level of abstraction in mapping
from a program model to an image. A great part
of visualization techniques and tools are based on
the graph metaphor. Graph theory supports also
the extensive research on graph layout algorithms.
Information can be looked at from various angles,
so the user has an understanding of the hierarchy
of the web site and its topology. When the data are
organized into ranks with each level subordinate to
the one above, a tree metaphor would be helpful,
with a hierarchy of its limbs, branches and twigs.
When we can list many kinds of equally impor-
tant data, we may need to describe the structure
and the relations among these data, which means,
explore their topology. A parking lot metaphor
