Five.Simple.Steps.-.A.Practical.Guide.to.Designing.with.Data.2010.pdf

A Practical Guide to Information Architecture

A Practical Guide to

Designing

with Data

by Brian Suda

A Practical Guide to Designing with Data

by Brian Suda

Published in 2010 by Five Simple Steps

Studio Two, The Coach House

Stanwell Road

Penarth

CF64 3EU

United Kingdom

On the web: www.vesimplesteps.com

and: www.designingwithdata.com

Please send errors to errata@vesimplesteps.com

Publisher: Five Simple Steps

Editor: Owen Gregory

Production Editor: Emma Boulton

Art Director: Mark Boulton

Designer: Nick Boulton

any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any information storage and

retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-907828-00-3

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library.

iii

A Practical Guide to Designing with Data

Foreword

Jeremy Keith

I have known Brian Suda for many years. We rst met through

the microformats community, where he uses his skills to make

structured data readily available and easily understandable.

Now he is applying those skills to the world of data.

I am covetous of Brianʼs mind. It is the mind of a scientist,

constantly asking questions: “What was the rst man-made object

with a unique identier?”, “What would a hypercube of bread

classication look like?”, “What would it sound like to say all fty

of the United States at the same time?”

Okay, that last one was from Family Guy. But whereas you or I

would be content to laugh at the joke and move on, Brian actually

tried it by layering fty audio recordings on top of one another.

For the record, it sounds like this: Mwashomomakota.

As you would expect from such an enquiring mind, this book

is not a shallow overview of graphs and charts. If you are looking

for a quick x on how to make your PowerPoint presentations pop,

this isnʼt the book for you. But if you want to understand what

happens when the human brain interacts with representations of

data, you have hit the motherlode.

It isnʼt hyperbole to say that this book will change the way

you look at the world. In the same way that typography geeks canʼt

help but notice the good and bad points of lettering in everyday

life, youʼre going to start spotting data design all around you.

Better still, you are going to learn how to apply that deep

knowledge to your own work. You will begin asking questions

of yourself: “Am I communicating data honestly and eectively?”,

“What is the cognitive overhead of the information I am

presenting?”

Your mind will be more Suda-like once you have read this

book. The phrase “change your mind” is usually used to mean

“reverse a decision”. I want to use the phrase in a dierent, more

literal way.

This book will change your mind.

A Practical Guide to Designing with Data

Introduction

Over the years, I have been digging through large data sets both for

work and pleasure. I love numbers, charts, graphs, visualizations,

zeitgeists, raumzeitgeists, infographics and old maps. Getting to

peek into what companies like Google get to see on a daily basis

– trends, fads, search volume, relatedness, all bundled up in an

interesting illustration – makes my day. Some people re-read the

same book over and over; I can stare at a dense illustration and

re-read its story. It makes me ask, “What caused these numbers?

Where did they all come from?” It has been estimated that the

Large Hadron Collider produces fteen petabytes (fteen million

gigabytes) of data a year. Itʼs impossible to look at a table of

fteen petabytes of information – there has to be a graphical

representation for anyone to comprehend data at this volume.

This is what excites me: the challenge of how to take these

boring numbers and design something more compelling. To tell

the story behind the data, we need to stop grasping for the perfect

visualization and instead return to the basic language of charts

and graphs. Only then can we begin to uncover the meaning and

relationships the data has to oer.

Beyond the basic bar charts and line graphs taught in

schools, a new breed of illustrations has recently appeared. These

new ʻvisualizationsʼ are an attempt to explain the underlying

information with a powerful visual impact. They take complex

ideas and distil them into beautiful graphics revealing the

interrelationships in the data. Some are so brilliantly executed

that there are now annual awards for newspaper and magazine

infographics to highlight their achievements. Sadly, over recent

years terms such as visualization and infographic have been

bandied around with almost no regard to their proper use or

meaning. Existing chart types and even slide shows have been

saddled with the more gratuitous term ʻinfographsʼ to sound

more impressive. There is a new vernacular in the realm of data

representation, but that doesnʼt mean we should ignore the

underlying principles and best practices of humble charts and

graphs. Once you have mastered the basics, more complex designs

and visualizations become easier to create.

I wrote this book because I feel that people arenʼt taking the

fundamentals of graphs and charts seriously. Many people are

inspired by fancy visualizations and jump right in over their heads.

As with any discipline, you need to put in the hard work by starting

from the beginning.

If you look at publishersʼ catalogues, there are plenty of books

on this topic, but they all cover somewhat esoteric aspects of

specic charts and graphs: either from an academic point of view,

stating how to right align numeric values or calculate condence

intervals to two standard deviations; or illustrated guides to

beautiful posters and the information they represent. While these

topics are certainly important, you need to consider the dataʼs

context and the readers who are looking to your charts and graphs

for answers. Having a beautiful poster or a well documented

condence interval is worthless if the rest of the design is

unreadable. I wrote this book in an attempt to distil as much

knowledge as possible into just the information you will need

day-to-day. There are plenty of specic kinds of charts for very

specialized elds, from nancial to weather data and everything

in between, but they all require a fundamental understanding of

the basics. Just because someone might be an expert in their eld

doesnʼt mean that they have the know-how to design with data.

This book is a peek into the pinball machine of my mind,

always bouncing around various related and sometimes unrelated

topics. I wanted to draw together several techniques you can use

in your charts and graphs, such as how to minimize the number

of pixels, and at the same time explain some interesting aspects of

colour in our lives. In addition, I felt it was important to explain

how to spot bad or misleading design: the kind that unscrupulous

people use to trick us into believing their interpretation of data

rather than the facts. Only then can you properly focus on the data,

bypass unnecessary distractions and avoid misrepresenting the

information.

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