6 ms·
A considered look at using Data Visualisation and Infographics
- Adrock 16y agoAll of Tufte's books should be included at the end.
- destraynor 16y agoHey Adrock, Good point, I'll update the post when I get back to my computer. Thanks for reading. Des
- viggity 16y agoIf you like Tufte, I totally recommend Ben Fry's Thesis (Fry is the author of the very popular "Processing" language that lets you create some awesome visualizations). It is an incredibly easy read. http://benfry.com/phd/ http://benfry.com/phd/
- jacobolus 16y agoAnd if you like those, the mother-of-all-infoviz-books is Jacques Bertin’s 1967 Sémiologie Graphique, finally back in print in English translation after 25 years out. about $50 on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589482611/ http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1589482611/
- bane 16y agoAnd his website. The comments on there have threads going on for months and offer an immense wealth of information on the subject.
- tom_b 16y agoCheck out books by Stephen Few (he is a Tufte fan). Few's books are very easily read and help develop your intuition for good "businessy " infographics.
- neovive 16y agoExcellent and very informative article. I would be interested in knowing what your tools of choice are for wireframing, charting and infographics?
- destraynor 16y agoOmnigraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, Numbers, Pixelmator, and rarely Keynote.
- neovive 16y agoThanks. This is the first I've heard of OmniGraphSketcher and it looks like quite a flexible tool.
- tel 16y agoI completely agree with the author, but I don't think it was taken far enough. The positive examples at the bottom are crawling out of whatever pit of hell the "184 milk jugs" came from, but meaningless colors, exuberant gradients, fading bars, big overlapping data points... these are all examples of chart junk as well. My favorite information design mantra is that your design should be exactly as exciting as your data. This probably takes it too far, but much like statistics it is so easy to lie with graphs that you're better off assuming you're lying accidentally.
- destraynor 16y agoHey tel, I wrote the article, thanks for your agreement, allow me to quickly explain myself. The gradients served purely as a background to the image in the article. I wasn't suggest that every diagram ever should have a gradient backdrop. Overlapping data points was a laziness of my behalf, I was just throwing these examples together in Omnigraffle. The colours in the Markov chain aren't meaningless, they are just out of context. (The idea came from a dash I designed where the app distinguished customers by colour type, so I followed that convention in the chain). Most of all thanks for reading my article, and for your considered feedback. Regards, Des (@destraynor)
- tel 16y agoHey Des, Sorry if my comment sounded overly critical — I'm sure you know well the frustration you can get from infographics, and simultaneously the urge to just have everything be somehow perfect, suddenly. I want to also mention that I appreciated bringing up the Victoria Secret graphics. Sometimes it is important to lie, much like humor being the best way to tell a sad story. Anyway, thanks for writing the article. Despite my criticisms, I'm always happy to see more arguments to whittle away abject trust in garden variety infographics. To round out my comment, I want to mention that I really appreciated the note that there is definitely a time for confusing, artistic infographics even if they are misleading. Victoria's Secret graphics can definitely raise awareness from 0 in a hostile crowd, they also can overemphasize detils to compensate for the audience's unwillingness to consider them meaningfully.
- rnadna 16y agoFYI, the link to the Cleveland article is broken. It should read https://secure.cs.uvic.ca/twiki/pub/Research/Chisel/ComputationalAestheticsProject/cleveland.pdf https://secure.cs.uvic.ca/twiki/pub/Research/Chisel/Computat...