Applying basic design principles, Part 8: Notes on novelty and task from a data vis killjoy This is part of a series of articles that illustrate how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous article reviewed chart choices for a dashboard redesign. Here, we’ll use an everyday example to step back a bit and…
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Dashboard Redesign - A Look at Chart Choices
This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. In the last installment, we thought through the purpose and context for a dashboard that we are redesigning. Up next, we will dive into revamping the content. Before we do that, it’s good to take a moment to…
Dashboard Redesign – Understanding Purpose
This article is part of a series that illustrates how basic design principles can improve information display. The previous installments focused on understanding the audience and context for your chart, and its core purpose. Here, we will take a look at how those considerations affect design decisions for the dashboard that we began redesigning in…
What’s your chart’s purpose?
In the last installment in this series, we looked at how knowing your audience can influence your chart design. Here, we’ll dig deeper into the chart as a method of communication, and how your own goals affect the best choice. Once you understand the audience and broader context for a visualization, it is time to…
Who is your chart for?
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…
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…
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:…
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…
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.