I spent the afternoon looking through magazines and the internet for examples of visual metaphors and managed to come up with quite a selection.
The next part of the exercise involved developing some illustrations which could be used to symbolise one of the metaphors. I selected "Dreams of Romance" and started with a spider diagram to brainstorm ideas. I came up with a fair amount of words and ideas and set about trying to get some of the ideas across with illustrations.
Ideas included - romantic novel, sleeping lady with dream clouds of love thoughts, clouds to represent dreams and rainbows. Flowers and chocolates to represent romance, a lady getting ready and made up to go out with dreams of romance, cuddles, hand holding, beds, love letters, a couple in the sunset, fairytales - sleeping beauty and an ironic take on it with a housewive doing the dishes.
I showed my drawings to my mum who thought that the images I had sketched all suggested romance and dreaming.
I'm finding that starting with a spider diagram is useful to generate ideas and have found that one idea often leads to another. Once I stated looking for examples of visual metaphors I found they are pretty common in advertising and to communicate sometimes complex ideas. Looking at some of the examples above I think that text along with the image helps to fully communicate the intented message.
I think that my visual shorthand is becoming better and I'm trying not too always worry about the technical accuracy but focus on getting across some ideas.
I tried to combine my ideas in a larger drawing taking the idea of fairytale romance and sleeping beauty.