DATA + DESIGNwhere math and art collide

Trina Chiasson, Infoactive | @trinachi | infoactive.co/data-design

This year, I did something new.

I worked with 80+ volunteer contributors to write a

300-page ebook.

How do you write an

open source ebook?

It started with a message…

Hi Trina! Stats dork from Chicago here… Do you have any plans to include tutorials for basic data cleaning and data selection techniques for users who may not have

any statistics background?

— Dyanna Gregory

This is what most statistics textbooks look like. Most designers say…

This isn’t for me

HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A BAD INFOGRAPHIC?

24.5%NO

84.5% YES

Why do so many infographics suck?

THEORY #1

Graphic Designers are evil.

They sacrifice truthful data representation

for aesthetic gain.

THEORY #2

Marketers are evil.

They sacrifice truthful data representation

for more clicks.

THEORY #3

Most people aren’t evil.

Good data visualization is really hard to do.

Who has skills in programming, design, and data analysis?

Not everyone is blessed with the innate ability to make brilliant data visualizations.

What data collection looked like, not too long ago

What data storage looked like, not too long ago

What data collection looks like today

1985: The birth of Excel

But what do we do with all of this data?

The price of light is less than the cost of darkness.

— Arthur C. Nielsen, Market Researcher & Founder of ACNielsen

Let’s send our data to a designer who can make it look pretty.

But most designers are not trained in stats

How about a friendly introduction to data?

But how do you write an open source ebook?

There’s no open source book

on how to write an open source book.

Don’t underestimate the awesomeness of strangers

on the internet.*

* Especially strangers who volunteer to write books about data in their free time.

In six months, we wrote and released the

English version.

Data + Design is now being translated in Chinese, Russian,

Spanish, and French.

Is it true that dataviz people

hate pie charts?

That’s a complex question.

Arguments against pie charts:

13% 100%

13%

A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between charts […] Given their low density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.

Edward Tufte, "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”

Graphical perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Models

Meat Pies & Color Theory

What Color Is This Chart?

#TheChart

Hot Pie Cold Pie

Hot PieCold Pie

Men who cannot read this chart

Men who can read this chart

So you should use monochromatic

color scales, right?

Monochromatic scales are better for continuous data

Be careful with multicolor scales

Red tends to stand out against other colors

Can you find the red circle?

How about now?

Which is easier?

Finding boundaries in color vs. shapes

Adapted from: Healey, Christopher G., Kellogg S. Booth, and James T. Ennis. “High-Speed Visual Estimation Using Preattentive Processing.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 3.2 (1996): 4.

So what colors should I use?

It depends, but…

BLUE & ORANGE

More visual trickery

Our brains look for baselines to compare

distances

But the dark blue line is measured on a

vertical scale.

Tricky, indeed.

Another example…

At first glance, you might think that the dark blue line decreased in value.

More visual trickery!

Same data, different story.

How do we make data

more human?

US unemployment rate from 2007-2009

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/11/06/business/economy/unemployment-lines.html?_r=0

In 2008, the Sichuan Earthquake killed over 60,000 people in China.

“For seven years she lived happily on this earth”

- Mother of an earthquake victim

How will you

share your data?

DATA + DESIGNwhere math and art collide

Trina Chiasson, Infoactive | @trinachi | infoactive.co/data-design