Utilizing Typographic Layout to Faithfully and Metaphorically Visualize One Dimensional Chaos

The visualization of chaotic systems plays a crucial role in revealing their dynamic behavior and inherent complexity. However, traditional methods often lack a quantitative assessment of their fidelity in representing chaos and fail to establish intuitive, metaphorical connections for non-expert audiences. To address these gaps, this study proposes a metaphorical visualization approach for one-dimensional chaotic systems, utilizing typographic layouts with “visual disorder” as a metaphor to convey chaos intuitively. The key contributions are twofold: first, a quantitative evaluation of classical chaos visualization techniques is presented, assessing their fidelity in representing chaos intensity; second, a visualization based on typographic layout is introduced and its fidelity and metaphorical appropriateness are quantitatively evaluated. Experimental results reveal a strong linear correlation between the visual disorder in typographic layouts and the Lyapunov Exponents of the chaotic systems, achieving fidelity comparable to that of traditional phase-space plot. At the same time, testers’ perception of the visual metaphor in layout visualization aligns more closely with the essential characteristics of chaos and significantly outperforms traditional visualization. This advantage is expected to help people, especially non-professionals, understand and learn the complex and abstract concept of chaos.