WEEK 3: Truthful Art Ch. 5&6
In class, looking at graphic designs, a question has always come to mind. How do designers choose the way they will display their data?
Reading chapter 5 of the Truthful Art answered this question, but not in the way I would have thought. There is no exact formula when deciding which type of chart to use to best represent your data. It is not that simple, but there are factors that you can consider when deciding the best way to represent your information. I found these to be very helpful:
1.Think about the task or tasks you want to enable, or the messages that you wish to convey. “Plot what you need to Plot.”
2. Try different graphic forms
3. Arrange components of the graphics in a way that extracts meaning
4. Test the outcomes
Through my own experience designing graphs and charts, I found that a project is never fully complete. To expand upon that, I think that in order to create a successful design trial and error must be apart of the process.
After designing a graph, play with it, and switch things up until you can create the best representation of your data.
Cairo’s Hierarchy of elementary perceptual tasks is another great method to use when designing a visualization.
Cairo further explains the process of visualizing data.
It never occurred to me to measure my data by figuring out the mode, median, and mean. I think this is very helpful to do before designing your graphic.
