
A considered look at using Data Visualisation and Infographics - destraynor
http://www.contrast.ie/blog/infographics-and-data-visualisations/
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neovive
Excellent and very informative article. I would be interested in knowing what
your tools of choice are for wireframing, charting and infographics?

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destraynor
Omnigraffle, OmniGraphSketcher, Numbers, Pixelmator, and rarely Keynote.

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neovive
Thanks. This is the first I've heard of OmniGraphSketcher and it looks like
quite a flexible tool.

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Adrock
All of Tufte's books should be included at the end.

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viggity
If 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/>

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jacobolus
And 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/>

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tel
I 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.

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destraynor
Hey 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)

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tel
Hey 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.

~~~
destraynor
Hey Tel, Thanks for your reply - no worries re: sounding critical. Your points
were valid.

The Victorias Secret thing is something I keep reminding myself. Life is not
about "usability" - the experience is more importantly.

Reminds me of a Joel Spolsky quote

"Usability is not everything.

If usability engineers designed a nightclub, it would be clean, quiet,
brightly lit, with lots of places to sit down, plenty of bartenders, menus
written in 18-point sans-serif, and easy-to-find bathrooms.

But nobody would be there. They would all be down the street at Coyote Ugly
pouring beer on each other— - Joel Spolsky"

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rnadna
FYI, the link to the Cleveland article is broken. It should read

[https://secure.cs.uvic.ca/twiki/pub/Research/Chisel/Computat...](https://secure.cs.uvic.ca/twiki/pub/Research/Chisel/ComputationalAestheticsProject/cleveland.pdf)

