Everyday Data Visualization

✍ Scribed by Desireé Abbott

• Publisher: Manning Publications Co.
• Year: 2024
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 264
• Edition: Final
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Radically improve the quality of your data visualizations by employing core principles of color, typography, chart types, data storytelling, and more.

Everyday Data Visualization is a field guide for design techniques that will improve the charts, reports, and data dashboards you build every day. Everything you learn is tool-agnostic, with universal principles you can apply to any data stack.

In Everyday Data Visualization you’ll learn important design principles for the most common data visualizations

Harness the power of perception to guide a user’s attention
Bring data to life with color and typography
Choose the best chart types for your data story
Design for interactive visualizations
Keep the user’s needs first throughout your projects

This book gives you the tools you need to bring your data to life with clarity, precision, and flair. You’ll learn how human brains perceive and process information, wield modern accessibility standards, get the basics of color theory and typography, and more.

About the Technology
Even mundane presentations like charts, dashboards, and infographics can become engaging and inspiring data stories! This book shows you how to upgrade the visualizations you create every day by improving the layout, typography, color, and accessibility. You’ll discover timeless principles of design that help you highlight important features, compensate for missing information, and interact with live data flows.

About the Book
Everyday Data Visualization guides you through basic graphic design for the most common types of data visualization. You’ll learn how to enhance charts with color, encourage users to interact and explore data and create visualizations accessible to everyone. Along the way, you’ll practice each new skill as you take a dashboard project from research to publication.

What's Inside
Bring data to life with color and typography
Choose the best chart types for your data story
Design interactive visualizations

✦ Table of Contents

contents
Front matter

preface

acknowledgments

about this book

about the author

about the cover illustration

Part 1

1 Hello, data viz!

1.1 What is data visualization?

1.2 What can you expect from this book?

1.3 Data storytelling: Know your audience

1.4 Some examples of data viz throughout time

Data viz in prehistory

Maps

The early modern era

Florence Nightingale

The later modern era

1.5 Data viz tools

Spreadsheets

Business intelligence tools

Code

Design software

2 How we perceive information

2.1 Preattentive attributes

Color

Form

Spatial positioning

Movement

2.2 Gestalt principles

Enclosure

Proximity

Similarity

Symmetry

The 3 Cs: Connection, closure, and continuity

3 It’s all about the data

3.1 Where you get data

Find some open data

Buy it

Gather it yourself

3.2 Dimensions and measures

3.3 A primer of data types

Strings

Numbers

Dates

Booleans

3.4 Describing data values

Discrete vs. continuous

Sequential vs. categorical

3.5 Data structures

Tabular data

Nested data

Part 2

4 Choosing colors

4.1 A little (or maybe big) bit of color theory

The additive model of color

The primary colors of light

The subtractive model of color

Color vision deficiency

4.2 A few color spaces

RGB space

HSB or HSV space

HSL space

The CIELAB or Lab* color space

4.3 Different kinds of color palettes and how to make them

Continuous palettes

Discrete palettes

Coming up with categorical color palettes

4.4 Inclusive color palettes

Designing for color blindness

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and color

Colors across cultures

5 Typography

5.1 Some basic vocabulary of typography

Character

Typeface vs. font

Serif vs. sans serif

Weight

Italics

Font size

X-height

5.2 Optimizing for readability

Small font sizes

Lining, tabular, and uniwidth numbers

Limit the number of fonts

5.3 How type sets the tone

5.4 Communicating a hierarchy with type

Color

Form

Spatial position

Proximity

Symmetry

5.5 Accessibility and typography

WCAG and typography

Dyslexia

6 Creating a good chart

6.1 What makes a good chart?

A good chart is simple

A good chart holds the user’s attention

Tell them stories

A good chart is truthful

Ultimately, a good chart gets the point across

6.2 Bar charts that aren’t boring

Lollipops

Iconographs

Bonus: Revisiting stacked bar charts

6.3 Making a good map viz

Thinking outside the choropleth

Avoiding the population density effect

7 Designing for interactivity

7.1 Basics of interaction design

Give clues about how and where to interact

Use familiar interaction patterns

Give feedback after an interaction

Anticipate errors

Make it beautiful

Bonus tip: Give users an out

7.2 Enabling exploration using interaction

The Visual Information-Seeking Mantra

More ways to enable exploration

Balancing when to require interaction

7.3 Interactions on different devices

A tiny intro to HTML

Mobile devices

Desktop

Screen readers

7.4 WCAG and interactivity

Part 3

8 Research, design, and development

8.1 The case study

8.2 The research and planning phase

Interviewing stakeholders and users

Digging up data

Documenting the requirements

8.3 The design phase

Shaping a data model around design

To sketch or not to sketch

Laying out a dashboard

8.4 The development phase

Prototyping

Get feedback early and often

Design choices

Documentation

9 Troubleshooting

9.1 How to handle missing data

Missing data points

Not-yet-existent data

9.2 What to do when you’re asked to ignore your viz-tuition

When asked to visualize a zillion categories in color

When asked to use someone else’s suboptimal design

9.3 Dealing with scope-creep and the never-ending project

Requirements gathering wasn’t thorough enough

Too many or not enough cooks in the kitchen

You’re trying too hard

9.4 The last word

Further resources

references

index

✦ Subjects

Design effective charts and dashboards