My readings this week have focused on some of the basics of effective graphics. Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information states one of the foundational elements of data graphic design as focusing on the story the data tells, rather than the details of how it was collected or portrayed. He goes on to cite graphs from different eras that either effectively do this or don’t. The reason for the lack of effectiveness of some graphs varies from manipulating the data in a way that changes the overall story of the graph, to showing too little data to create a full story. Another video I came across while researching for this week was a presentation on how to make data of climate change more personal, to connect better with the general public. The woman giving the talk works for The New York Times and creates different interactive graphics for the newspaper. Her talk focused on how climate change is often viewed as an impersonal, global event, and how that affects the public mentality. She found that integrating personal elements into the graph would help the general public see how urgent of a crisis it is. Whether it was showing the viewer the temperature change in their hometown, or how climate change will affect people with similar backgrounds, making the data more personal helped the viewer more fully understand the crisis and connect with the data.
Recent Comments