Make every visual earn its place
A diagram faces the same test as a sentence — what work does it do, and does it do it here?
On this page
An essay by Ved, a writer in our community, built around diagrams of the consulting principle MECE, was the first piece our workshop discussions ran through the exact frame we apply to prose: what work does this visual do? If it raises more questions than it answers, cut it.
The prose test for pictures
The essay's drone render was the negative case — it "added more questions instead of answering some." The "primary colors" diagram was the positive case: it made MECE graspable at a glance, exactly when the abstract idea was introduced.
The image has to hit on first contact, not in retrospect.
Place it where the concept lands
A picture you only understand in retrospect isn't doing the reader's work at the moment they meet it; the strong diagrams arrived exactly when their concept did. And in a visual-led piece the image is the argument and the text is the support, so a misaligned chart actively undercuts the prose.
A screenshot as proof, not decoration
An essay by another writer in our community, Vincenzo, gave the positive case from the other side: a story-driven technical piece that two readers, Seona and Jolleen, felt a visual could carry. Both wanted a screenshot of the notifications or the prompt at the story's center — not ornament, but the visual proof the prose was only asserting. Screenshots could have worked in that piece precisely because it was so story-driven: a screenshot of an 80 percent reply rate from 100 messages delivers at a glance the result the sentences can only claim.
Try it
- Subject every diagram to the prose test: what work does it do, and does it do it here?
- Cut visuals that raise more questions than they answer.
- Put the illustration at the moment its concept is introduced; this is pointing a camera at it in another medium.