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

Good Visualization

Although people have been charting and graphing data for centuries, only in the past few decades have researchers been studying what works and what doesn’t. In that respect, visualization is a relatively new field. There still isn’t a consensus on what visualization actually is. Is visualization something that has been generated by a computer following a set of rules? If a person has a hand in the design process, does that make it not a visualization? Are information graphics visualization, or do they belong in their own category?

Look online, and you can find lots of threads discussing differences and similarities between information graphics and visualization or essays that try to define what visualization is. It always leads to a never-ending back and forth without resolution. These opposing opinions lead to varied criteria for what makes a data graphic good or bad.

Statisticians and analysts, for example, generally think of visualization as traditional statistical graphics that they can use in their analyses. If a graphic or interactive doesn’t help in analysis, then it’s not useful. It’s a failure. On the other hand, if you talk to graphic designers about the same graphic, they might think the work is a success because it displays the data of interest fairly and presents the data in an engaging way.

What you need to do is smush them all together, or at least get them in the same room together more often. The analytically minded can learn a lot from designers ...