How to Translate Visually Complex Topics into Clear Visuals

A Framework for Turning “Wait, What?” Into “Ohhh, Got It.”

If you work in communications long enough, you learn a painful truth: the more important the information, the more likely it is to arrive in a form that looks like someone emptied a filing cabinet into a blender. Climate data, healthcare workflows, policy memos; none of these were designed with audiences in mind. They were designed for singular people. By folks who consider “readability” a personal insult.

And that’s where the momentum dies.

Before anyone can take action, (e.g. approve funding, adopt a program, sign off on a workflow) they have to understand it. And complex information does not want to be understood. It wants to sit in a PDF no one opens.

So let’s fix that.

Why Complexity Can Slow Momentum

Complexity freezes people.

It turns simple decisions into week-long email threads, sparks endless clarifying meetings, and sends projects straight into the purgatory known as “Let’s circle back.”

Most organizations deeply understand their subject matter. That’s not the issue. The issue is that when they try to explain it, everything comes out as:

• A paragraph with four acronyms you’ve never heard

• A chart that looks like a spider fell onto Excel

• A policy explanation that could double as a sedative

When the audience’s cognitive load spikes, their willingness to act plummets. If people don’t know what they’re looking at, they won’t move forward. Momentum dies.

The Framework

This process works most large complex topics; like explaining climate resilience, tech workflows, or a policy change that sounds simple until someone asks, “Wait, what does that mean in real life?”

1. Raw Info

This is all the stuff you get handed at the beginning:
Research reports. Spreadsheets. A the deck someone swears is “already pretty trimmed down.” Paragraphs that were supposed to be bullet points but rebelled.

Your job here is to separate what’s useful from what’s just existing. Not everything deserves to make it into the visual. Some information can stay in the attic with the Halloween decorations.

Ask:

• What is the core idea?

• What does the audience actually need to know?

• Which details are decorative parsley?

Once you strip away your internal noise, the message gets sharper.

2. Message

Now take the pile of cleaned-up information and boil it down to one thing:
What is the audience supposed to understand, remember, or do?

This is where people get stuck. Teams often want to say three things, and two of them contradict the first one. But a visual can’t hold seven priorities. Neither can your viewers.

If you were only allowed to say one sentence, what would it be?

That’s your message.

It becomes the anchor for everything else.

3. Visual Metaphor

Now we translate the message into something the brain recognizes instantly.
Visual metaphors are shortcuts to comprehension.

Examples:

• Climate systems → rivers, cycles, loops

• Policy impact → doors, bridges, levers

• Medical Tech workflows → pathways, signals, step-by-step journeys

• Data patterns → growth, hotspots, clusters

The right metaphor makes a complex idea feel familiar. It reduces cognitive load and gives the audience something to hold onto. This is the moment they go from “Huh?” to “Ahhh.”

If a metaphor can make climate data feel approachable, trust me, it can handle whatever you’re working with.

4. Action

Finally, you turn understanding into a next step.

A visual is a nudge. Once the audience grasps the system, pattern, or change, they’re ready to act:

• Approve the policy

• Fund the project

• Follow the workflow

• Learn more about the risks

• Share it with their stakeholders

Action is the finish line.
If your audience can understand and move forward confidently, the visual did its job.

A Real-World Example

Here’s how this framework holds up in an actual field where complexity tends to multiply like gremlins after midnight.

Public Health Policy

Raw info: legal language, regulatory layers, bureaucratic gunk.
Message: “Here’s how this change affects real life.”
Metaphor: A switch
Action: Understand the policy impact for your community.

Good policy visuals turned “subsection 3(A)(vi)” into something humans can actually follow.