Visualize This: The FlowingData Guide to Design, Visualization, and Statistics

Prepare Yourself

You need to know your source material to tell good stories with data. This is an often overlooked part of designing data graphics. When you start, it’s easy to get excited about your end result. You want something amazing, beautiful, and interesting to look at, and this is great; but you can’t do any of that if you have no idea what you’re visualizing. You’ll just end up with something like Figure 9-1. How can you explain interesting points in a dataset when you don’t know the data?

Learn about the numbers and metrics. Figure out where they came from and how they were estimated, and see if they even make sense. This early data gathering process is what makes graphics in The New York Times so good. You see the end results in the paper and on the web, but you miss all the work that goes into the graphics before a single shape is drawn. A lot of the time, it takes longer to get all the data in order than it does to design a graphic.

So the next time you have a dataset in front of you, try not to jump right into design. That’s the lazy person’s way out, and it always shows in the end. Take the time to get to know your data and learn the context of the numbers.

Tip

Visualization is about communicating data, so take the time to learn about what makes the base of your graphic, or you’ll just end up spouting numbers.

Punch some numbers into R, read any accompanying documentation so that you know what each metric represents, and see if there’s anything that looks weird. ...