People often come to me wanting to know which visualization is the best one for their situation. Before you pick a chart type or visualization approach, it’s important to understand the context in which the chart will be used. The context for a visualization can be defined in many ways, but ultimately it comes down…
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Whitespace in dashboard design
In the last post in this series, we looked at how whitespace can help to clarify a restaurant menu. In this post, we’ll combine whitespace and text hierarchy to improve the design of this dashboard. This example is an actual dashboard that I found online, redrawn and edited to anonymize the information. This post…
The discipline of not jumping right in
I have the day off from work, and am in the earliest stages of exploring a new project. I have a general topic, and I’ve found a couple of datasets to confirm that there is information out there that I could compile and use. And now comes the hardest part: resisting the urge to jump…
White space: Visual Punctuation
“How do you use white space?” This is one of the most frequent questions that I get as a designer, especially from people who need to create information-dense displays like a dashboard or interactive display. White space is the blank area between items on the page, and it is very important for helping information to…
Designing for charts
“Good information design works like a tour guide that tells the user what matters most and where to go from here.” Every design system is the result of competition between different constraints, and a good design solution balances these competing influences to support a specific user task. For a chart, the primary task is analytical:…
Perceptual salience and selective tuning
Most charts use more than one kind of encoding at once. Whenever two or more encodings are used in the same chart, we need to consider how they work together and their relative importance on the page. The visual importance of an object is called its perceptual salience, which describes how much it stands out from the rest of the items in the chart.
Properties of encodings
We create an encoding by applying a visual variable to an information channel. A successful encoding makes a good match between the information channel and the particular strengths of the visual variable used to represent it. It is important to check that the visual variable is flexible enough to accommodate all of the data values that the information channel contains: the marks created with an encoding must be distinct enough that a person can read their data values.
Kinds of data
This post is part of a larger series focused on exploring the fundamental principles of data visualization. Eventually, the collection may grow into something larger and more coherent. For now, each post simply picks up and plays with one idea related to how we represent data visually. Other posts in this series can be found…
Data Vis as Guide Dog
Charts and graphs have a job to do: the secret is knowing when they are (and aren’t) on the job This post was originally published on Medium for the Data Visualization Society. As a data vis designer living in both the art and data worlds, I sometimes hear that I should “just go wild” or “let…
Play with encodings
I have been playing around with visual encodings lately, as a way to explore different kinds of visual expression. (The previous posts outline the origin story and rules for this project in great detail, so I’m not going to go into it here.) Visual encodings are essentially rules for how to create visual marks from…