Communication Patterns

Chapter 2. Clarify the Clutter

Your chances of communicating successfully are drastically reduced if an audience has to work hard to understand your message. This chapter explores the patterns and antipatterns that will help you reduce your audience’s cognitive load. You will identify and eliminate elements of your diagram that obscure your message, and split that message across multiple diagrams where needed.

Color Overload

When talking about the color overload antipattern, I often refer to it as an explosion of unicorns. In most cases, the colors used in diagrams are not given much, if any, thought at all. When too many colors are used, the audience may have difficulty matching them to their meaning without a lot of mental effort (even if a legend is included). Even worse, colors that are used without any meaning at all cause the audience to waste mental energy deciphering a detail that’s irrelevant to your intended message.

This antipattern usually occurs because the diagram’s author had no motivation to consider color or no idea that color is important in visual communication. The author might use default colors or randomly selected colors in a diagramming application because that is quicker than taking the time to think about color selection or because that individual or business has always used those colors.

Tip

Failing to consider color in a visual presentation is an example of being “penny-wise but pound-foolish.” You may save time creating the diagram but will spend ...