Design competition to create graphics to illustrate cybersecurity stories

Illustrating abstract articles is a pain in the ass, and in the age of social media, a post without an illustration is likely to disappear without attaining any kind of readership, which leaves those of us who cover the field endlessly remixing HAL9000 eyes using walls of code, Matrix text-waterfalls, or variations on hacker-in-a-hoodie.

Eli Sugarman from the Hewlettt Foundation has partnered with design giants Ideo to launch the cybersecurity visuals challenge, designed to create a visual vocabulary for infosec that conveys "the huge stakes for governments, industry and ordinary people alike inherent in topics like encryption, surveillance and cyber conflict."

It's a design competition, with the final output to be released under open licenses to enable "nonprofits, media outlets and anyone else in need of cyber imagery... to draw on a visual language that better reflects the reality of cybersecurityin all of its salience and complexityand what it means for individuals, corporations and governments around the world."

25 runners up will win cash of $500, up to five grand prizes of $7K will be awarded to the finalists. Everyone gets "access to resources and community support," and the runners-up and finalists get "mentorship from a cybersecurity expert."

The fifth and final design principle identified in the report is the need to make the invisible visible. The core challenge of depicting cybersecurity visually, of course, is that so much of it is not tangible. How should a visual creator depict a signal speeding along a fiber optic cable?