Pictures vs Text Grudge Match

One of my current video projects is an explanatory video about visual thinking. Intrigued by a Garr Reynolds online SlideShare presentation about John Medina’s Brain Rules, I got the book and read it. I think Garr did a great job in summarizing Medina’s chapter on vision. But I thought it would be fun to take it a bit further and produce an explanatory video on it, because I’m of the opinion that the visual thinking community has fallen short in explaining visual thinking (especially in a visual format) and I think the concepts in chapter 10 of Brain Rules would be a good place to start.

So, I’m in the brainstorming phase, sketching out visual metaphors to try to illustrate some concepts. In covering the so-called picture superiority effect, Medina referred to some experiments comparing pictures to text and oral communication, saying, “picture demolishes them both.” On reading that phrase the mental image that jumped into my brain was a pictures vs text grudge match (fictitious fights and contests between pop culture figures) - a boxing or wrestling match with pictures vs text and pictures standing over a knocked out competitor, text. My first sketch of this:

Pictures vs text grudge match sketch 1

After thinking about it though, I thought, shouldn’t the fallen, knocked out text competitor be, well, text? Wouldn’t that communicate the metaphor better? So, I came up with the next sketch:

Pictures vs text grudge match sketch 2

Now instead of drawing a picture of the knocked out text, it just has text describing that there’s a knocked out fighter there. Granted it’s a bit obscure and you have to think about it a bit harder and longer to “get it” but I think it might communicate the metaphor better. So, my question to any of you reading this is, what do you think? Which sketch concept communicates visually better? Or maybe there’s a hybrid approach (on discussing it with my wife, I think that might be the answer). What do you think?