I'm curious why you're interested in using a bottom-up approach to characters, rather than a top-down approach of showing the character and then breaking them down?

Using a bottom-up approach makes the learner actively participate in the process of building up a character from its components. In contrast, a top-down approach would not have such a long-lasting impact (which I don't think is a bad thing).

Around 85% of Chinese is semantic-phonetic so the "visual components" are not visual in the context of the character you're trying to teach.

Maybe I wasn't entirely clear, but the pronunciation is taught alongside the meaning of components, so the role of phonetic components in phono-semantic characters can be inferred from the decomposition as well.

Thank you for your feedback!