Increase the visual impact of your mind maps with images and color
Feb 12th, 2009 | By Chuck Frey | Category: Mind Mapping Basics
Images add visual interest to your mind maps. They can be utilized as the central topic of your map, or attached to other topics, and add a wealth of meaning and context to your maps. According to mind mapping expert Tony Buzan, adding images to mind maps has numerous benefits:
They help to focus the brain, which prefers colorful objects to black-and-white ones.
They leverage your brain’s powerful associative capabilities. Images tap into our imagination at a much deeper level than words alone can.
Words and images together multiply your intellectual power. It’s the combination of the two that make mind maps such a rich visual medium for creative expression.
Images are an excellent memory aid. Simply put, they tend to be more memorable to your brain than words do – as the old saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Buzan has this to say on the benefits of incorporating images into your mind maps:
“They make use of a massive range of cortical skills: color, form, line, dimension, texture, visual rhythm and especially imagination – a word taken from the Latin imaginari, literally meaning to picture mentally. Images are therefore more evocative than words, more precise and potent in triggering a wide range of associations and thereby enhancing creative thinking and memory.”
Where can you find images to use in your maps? My favorite source is iStockPhoto.com – a collection of over 3.2 million low-cost, high-quality, royalty-free images and illustrations. I use their pay-as-you go credit system; points can be purchased in bundles from 10 to 1,500. I pay just under US1.00 per image for some truly outstanding images – well worth it, in my opinion. Plus what makes it really useful is that contains numerous images that can be used to visually describe not just things, but concepts – such as creativity and success. Google Images is a free and nearly inexhaustible source of images, but be careful using them. Some of them may have copyrights or royalty fees associated with them.
Using color in your mind maps
Like images, color adds meaning and context to your mind maps. Most mind mapping programs enable you to change the colors of topic backgrounds, topic text, branch lines and map background. These settings allow you to personalize your map, and make it more colorful and appealing to yourself and others. A few programs come with color “themes,” which can be used to apply a complementary group of colors to specific elements of your maps. This can be real time-saver compared to adding color to each element of your map individually!
Colors can be used to “code” the content of your mind maps. For example, action items can be colored green, while concerns or problems could be colored red. The meanings of these colors are deeply embedded in the minds of most Western cultures (just think of a traffic light, where red means stop, yellow means caution and green means go).
One caveat when it comes to using color and images
You should definitely incorporate color and images into all of your maps, to make them more visually engaging. But be careful not to overdo it. It’s easy to get carried away with these elements, which may waste your time without adding any more value to your map. Ideally, your use of color and images ought to reinforce the meaning of your map; if an image or color doesn’t add to the message that your map is trying to convey, then you may want to consider eliminating it.
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And a second caveat about colour would be to spare a thought for those who actually find colour confusing! When you use colour, keep it simple and with strong contrast. When you’re not colour-sighted contrast is good, subtle variations just don’t exist (trust me, I speak as one who knows). And don’t assume that just because two colours look very different to you, they will look that way to the non-colour-sighted. I spent two years at University wondering why they’d put a pink carpet in a male student’s room only to find out it was actually brown!
Having said that, I find mindmapping to be one of the most useful tools for preparing talks and analysing all sorts of thins. Even without colour!
Great post. And I totally agree — the use of visuals can be extremely important, but can be overdone as well! I like to add images to ‘main’ topics to help people build the associations and navigate into a section of a map. For color, I like to use it to make either a section or topic jump out at you and get noticed. If everything is colored or has images, the result can be opposite of what you intended. It can contribute to overwhelm and cause ‘map shock’.
Power feature: If your colors have meaning in your map, you can FILTER on it. In other words, topics that are yellow with red text have critical importance. You can set up and save filters to show all your critical items and hide the other topics.
A couple of other thoughts on this subject: YELLOW — I recently read that the brain remembers things highlighted in yellow better than any other color. Ever wonder why highlighters first came out in the color yellow? I think there was some research done to guide that decision. So, if you just highlighted some topics in yellow, that information would be more memorable in your
Last, color blindness! I saw a sight recently that can run tests on images. I found it very eye-opening (pun intended!). You can save a map as an image and run a test on it to see how your audience may be seeing it if they have a form of color blindness. http://is.gd/iWQR
Thanks Chuck for all your posts!
[...] Increase the visual impact of your mind maps with images and color by Chuck Frey [...]
[...] Add color to your map: Many users of mind mapping software stick with the default settings of their favorite programs, which means that they are frequently black-and-white creations. This diminishes their visual appeal, and makes their contents less memorable. According to Tony Buzan, the developer of the mind mapping technique, your brain thrives on color and imagery. So take the time to add color to the topics, lines and text of your mind map. Several programs, such as NovaMind, do this automatically, making each branch radiating from the central topic a different color. If it makes sense within the context of the topic of your map, consider color coding its main branches based upon the content it contains. For example, action items could be grouped together on one branch and colored green, key issues to consider before implementing a new project could be colored in red, and so forth. (Read my previous post about adding color to your mind maps) [...]