Visual Thinking for Information Design

Visual Thinking for Information Design, Second Edition brings the science of perception to the art of design. Designers increasingly need to present information in ways that aid their audience’s thinking process. Fortunately, results from the relatively new science of human visual perception provide valuable guidance. In this book, Colin Ware takes what we now know about perception, cognition, and attention and transforms it into concrete advice that students and designers can directly apply. He demonstrates how designs can be considered as tools for cognition - extensions of the viewer’s brain in much the same way that a hammer is an extension of the user’s hand. The book includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams. Renamed from the first edition, Visual Thinking for Design, to more accurately reflect the focus on infographics, this timely revision has been updated throughout and includes more content on pattern perception, the addition of new material illustrating color assimilation, and a new chapter devoted to communicating ideas with images.

• Presents visual thinking as a complex process that can be supported in every stage using specific design techniques
• Provides practical, task-oriented information for designers and software developers charged with design responsibilities
• Includes hundreds of examples, many in the form of integrated text and full-color diagrams
• The book is steeped in the principles of “active vision,” which views graphic designs as cognitive tools
• Features a new chapter titled Communicating Ideas with Images that focuses on a new emerging theory of human cognition and how that theory, which deals with the construction and refinement of predictive mental models in the mind, provides a solid foundation for reasoning about what should go into a presentation

Students taking relevant courses in information design, industrial design, interaction design, and web design. Designers of all kinds, including professionals in information design, industrial design, interaction design, web design, and users of information visualization, who need practical guidance in visual and cognitive science in order to excel at their jobs, or future job

1. Visual queries
2. What we can easily see
3. Structuring two-dimensional space 2.5d
4. Color
5. Getting the information: visual space and time
6. Visual objects, words, and meaning
7. Visual and verbal narrative
8. Creative meta seeing
9. The dance of meaning
10. Communicating ideas by means of images