Tag: Form to Data

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. 

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. 

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…

I wrote before about some recent feedback that has challenged me to explore a more artistic, graphic direction in my work. Part of that challenge has been defining the conditions where I would feel open to pursuing that work. I invented a project for myself, to feel my way around some of these ideas, to…

Visual variables can be used to represent two kinds of information: identity channels that tell us what an object is or what kind it is, and value channels that give us additional information about the object itself. Each visual variable does these jobs more or less well, depending on how humans perceive visual stimuli.

Sometimes, a single mark can be used to encode multiple pieces of information. The main purpose of a chart is to show relationships between data points in some visual way. To support more sophisticated analysis, we often need to show that data points belong to multiple categories at one time, so that we can understand relationships between different groups.