Visual Confections: Juxtapositions from the Ocean of the Streams of Story

Overview

A confection is a single picture that gathers many separate image-events — some real, some imagined — and juxtaposes them on the flat page to make a point, narrate, explain, or list. It is neither a faithful scene (map, photograph) nor data poured into a standard format (chart, table); it is concocted on purpose, "showing all at once what never has been together" (p.127). The discipline matters because confections are the native form for explanatory posters, mixed-media dashboards, infographic narratives, and content-first interfaces — and they live or die on the quality of the thinking behind them, not the cleverness of the assembly.

§1. What a confection is — and is not

Tufte's model (the "Ocean of the Streams of Story," borrowed from Rushdie; definitions p.121):

• An event = the intersection of a noun and a verb (subject + action) — something happens.
• A plane of events = one time-slice holding every noun-verb combination at that instant.
• A story = a progression of noun-verb incidents — one strand running through time.
• An image sequence (Marey, Muybridge) = a short stretch of a single strand.
• A confection = an assembly of many image-events selected from different strands, lifted out and juxtaposed on the still flatland of paper.

What a confection does with that material: illustrate an argument, enforce visual comparisons, combine the real and the imagined, and tell another story.

Confection vs. the two things people confuse it with: