Three Visual Improvements of Conflict Events in the Israel-Hezbollah War

A good example pulled from the pages of Bloomberg.

JD Solomon
3 min readOct 5, 2024
Recent air strikes in Beirut, Lebanon. The visuals from major news sources often need enhancement for accessibility.
Recent air strikes in Beirut, Lebanon (Photo source: YouTube/ABC News)

A visual in a recent USA Today on increased conflict events by Israel and Hezbollah in the Israel-Hezbollah War. Conflict events are air and drone strikes, long-range attacks, and other hostilities. Three things could use some help with the visual. Those same three things apply to visuals used for business communication, specifically when communicating to leadership.

Three Good Things

Let’s start with the good things.

  • The visual makes comparing and contrasting activities easy by showing three different times.
  • The visual shows multiple aspects in the same graphic, notably both Israel and Hezbollah activities and their intensity.
  • The visual uses darker highlight colors on light backgrounds.
“Israel Attacks More Hezbollah Targets as Iran Backs Cease-Fire” — Story by Henry Meyer, Dana Khraiche and Golnar Motevalli
“Israel Attacks More Hezbollah Targets as Iran Backs Cease-Fire” — Story by Henry Meyer, Dana Khraiche and Golnar Motevalli (Image sources provided on visual)

Three Things That Need Improvement

The visuals from major news sources often need enhancement for accessibility.

Icons (Symbols)

One easy way to check color and contrast is to convert the visual to greyscale on a PowerPoint slide. You can also print in black and white.

Converting to greyscale indicates it’s not possible to determine which symbols belong to Israel and which to Hezbollah.

One solution is to use a square or triangle for one group’s strikes and a circle for the other.

Colors

Blacks and dark blues are authoritative colors, and dark green is a good third choice. Purple is a whimsical color.

With black burned as part of the background, dark green would have been better than purple. Combined with an icon change, dark green will help with the gradient compared with gold.

Contrast

The dark purple (hex #7e4695) in the legend fails the contrast test on the dark black. The gold (hex #cdad54) fails the contrast test on the while. The gradient makes the base poor contrast ratios (around 2.1) even worse.

The better solution would be to use a white background instead of black, make the base map beige or light tan, and use dark green in a square and orange in a circle. “Better” means that this combination passes the contrast test and is accessible to all readers.

Moving to a white background also helps the print become more legible. Small or thin white fonts on dark backgrounds are difficult to read.

Three Visual Improvements

The visual has several good aspects. You will like it if your vision is good. On the other hand, you may get frustrated if your vision is poor or not as good as it once was. The choice is up to the creator, and for artistic reasons, there may be good reasons for the visual being the way it is. But if not, then it’s just a lack of awareness, or maybe not caring, that makes the visual less accessible than it could be.

JD Solomon is the founder of JD Solomon, Inc., the creator of the FINESSE fishbone diagram®, and the co-creator of the SOAP criticality method©. He is the author of Communicating Reliability, Risk & Resiliency to Decision Makers: How to Get Your Boss’s Boss to Understand and Facilitating with FINESSE: A Guide to Successful Business Solutions.

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