Category: Visualization

Cedric Scherer explains some of the psychology behind understanding of color in visuals:

Without any intention, the two variations of my visualization triggered different emotional reactions. While the red chart likely leads you to think “Wow, Berlin summers are quite hot,” the blue version may push you to think of summers as rainy and rather cold.

In general, we should have in mind that different details might spark different emotions and expectations in our viewers. Some of these details will make it easier for them to understand the chart in the manner the designer intended. 

Having experienced (parts of) a Berlin summer, let me confirm that they are not hot when compared to the midwestern or southeastern US.

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Alex Velez shows how you can use simple text to share information:

If you’re unsure about what I mean when I say simple text, I’m referring to the idea that just because you have numbers doesn’t mean you need to build a graph—as in this simple text example. Sometimes words with big numbers written in bold fonts (aka BANs) are more effective, especially when communicating one or two data points.

Some people’s hesitancy with simple text is that they think it’s unrealistic: the notion that you might only share one or two numbers with an audience. It’s is a fair point; it does seem a bit silly to think that you’d only talk through a couple of specific values when presenting data—even though I’m sure there are such occasions. Rather than thinking of the ideal use-case for simple text as when you only have one or two numbers in totality, consider when it may make sense to draw attention to one or two numbers in your larger story.

This is a good reminder that you don’t need everything to be fancy, shiny, and visual-laden. A little bit of text can go a long way in laying out a visual. That said, the warning is that text seems to be a little easier for people to miss, especially if there’s a lot of it. That’s where Alex’s explanation really pays off.

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Elizabeth Ricks takes us through a surprisingly tricky chart:

An extension of a scatterplot, a bubble chart is commonly used to visualize relationships between three or more numeric variables.  Each bubble in a chart represents a single data point. The values for each bubble are encoded by 1) its horizontal position on the x-axis, 2) its vertical position on the y-axis, and 3) the size of the bubble. Sometimes, the color of the bubble or its movement in animation can represent more dimensions. 

I say surprisingly tricky because it’s easy to overwhelm the user when trying to view bubble charts. I think the best scenarios are cases in which you have relatively few data points and the size element is mandatory.

Hans Rosling (RIP) did an outstanding job of displaying this kind of chart with the Gapminder dataset.

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