Building Responsive Data Visualization for the Web

Chapter 11 Building the Future-Friendly Web

It’s time to move away from implementation details and look at the bigger picture. Responsive design is not just a solution for the current state of devices, but a way to build proactively—anticipating the likely needs of future users in order to provide the best experience. This chapter ties the knowledge you’ve gained throughout this book to a more theoretical discussion about just how you should think about building web experiences.

The Future of Data Design

At this point, you should be comfortable designing for the devices currently on the market. Recall or revisit Chapter 2 and Chapter 7, describing the tenets that guide responsive design and data visualization. Responsive design’s guiding tenets are measure, flow, nesting, end points, breakpoints, typography, and images. Responsive data visualization’s tenets are measure, flow, end points, breakpoints, images, grouping, and layering.

The tenets unique to responsive design are nesting and typography. Intuitively, this makes sense: Nesting layout design certainly has an effect on visualization, but it is more a function of the container than the data itself. The same can be said of typography: Responsive type design is not limited to data visualization, but rather will affect all aspects of your product.

The tenets unique to responsive data visualization are grouping and layering, which are closely tied to the changing amounts of data you both:

• Receive on the input ...