Unpacking Visual Metaphors in Infographics: A Design Space

Visual metaphors illuminate infographics by leveraging graphical representations from more familiar source domains (e.g., a dandelion) to explain concepts in more abstract target domains (e.g., information propagation). However, designing effective visual metaphors remains a challenge, especially for novice designers, because it requires selecting a suitable source concept for the target concept and devising a reconstruction strategy that maps the source concept to the target concept. Through a systematic review of 2,029 metaphoric infographics, we derive a design space that characterizes visual metaphors across three dimensions: target, source, and reconstruction strategy. We demonstrate the utility of our design space by transforming it into actionable design knowledge for prompting generative models in metaphor ideation. A user study with 30 participants shows that design-space-augmented prompting generates more diverse and inspiring metaphor designs than direct prompting without design-space cues.