Steps to Beautiful Visualizations

(sneak preview)

UIE Web App Master’s TourSpring, 2011Noah Iliinsky

Visualization allows access to huge amounts of data

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w

Visualization for presentation, when you do have a story to tell

https://www.msu.edu/~howardp/softdrinks.pdf

Visualization for analysis, when you don’t (yet) have a story to tell

http://www.tableausoftware.com/public/gallery/taleof100

How to do it: Use a format that fits the data

http://elections.nytimes.com/2008/president/whos-ahead/key-states/map.html

West - East

North - South

Axes give you information for free!

(in two different ways)

Consistent, highly differentiable encodings

Painfully wrong!

http://www.digitalsurgeons.com/facebook-vs-twitter-infographic/