Visual Metaphors

Visual metaphors are an advanced graphic design technique used in news, advertising and public service announcements to draw users' attention to a message. They blend two objects together in a way that is novel and useful in conveying a message symbolically.

Professional examples:


The Economist article on the left illustrates "Brazil takes off" by symbolizing Brazil with the iconic Brazilian statue Christ the Redeemer and blending it with a rocket literally taking off. The middle advertisement associates Tabasco with heat by blending the hot sauce bottle with a fire extinguisher. The public service announcement on the right shows the Earth melting by blending it with an ice cream cone.

We have created a system that decomposes the process of making visual blends into a pipeline of human microtasks and computational techniques. The pipeline follows the iterative design process with steps involving brainstorming, synthesis, and iteration.

The Visual Metaphor Pipeline:


We ran 5 case studies where groups of 2 or 3 people familiar with the pipeline collaborated to make a visual metaphor for a message. Here are the results:

Metaphors produced for the 5 messages in the study, with aesthetic improvements done by the users:

Current Work:

The metaphors created in the study above were all associations between two nouns, but there exists an even more exciting subset of metaphors that involve a noun and a verb. We saw two examples in the professional metaphors at the beginning: "Brazil + Take off" and "Earth + Melt". Note that in these two examples the symbol for the verb is a noun that is undergoing said verb.

Here are three more examples of visual metaphors that blend a noun and a verb:


I am currently investigating strategies to semi-automate the search for symbols that can represent verbs. One such strategy is to expand a verb into a set of synonyms and hypnernyms. We can then search these terms individually in an image database.