Drawing Out: How designers analyse written texts in visual ways

Within design discourse, much attention towards the written word is directed at typology – how words are arranged to visually communicate meaning. In this chapter, we consider the written word from a different perspective, revealing how designers analyse written texts for research and concept development. We describe three analytical methods we developed through our own practice and observed in the practice of other designers. We name these methods Visual Abstraction, Focused Data-mining and Exploratory Data-mining. Each method is supported by examples from our own work and the work of Stefanie Posavec and Sam Winston, who both describe analyzing written texts as part of their design process