Presentation Matters, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Data Communication
What do you associate with the color blue?
Here’s a test: What do you, on your most instinctive level, associate with the color blue?
A. Authority, calm, peace
B. Low numerical value
C. Nebulous sense of positivity
Answers
AI’m going to go out on a limb and assume you approach visuals from a social, more right-brained standpoint. This is something all artists and designers develop an instinct for when structuring composition and color weight within a piece.
Every color has cultural baggage, and every person will have something that a color reminds them of — whether they realize it or not. Here, blue might make you think of valuable lapis lazuli, prized in the ancient world. Maybe the freedom of the sky. Perhaps Hinduism’s blue-skinned deities and fifth chakra. Or early Disney girls — who wore blue in careful alignment with the robes of the Virgin Mary (Peter Pan’s Wendy, for example, or one of Sleeping Beauty’s dresses). It might make you think of calm waters, or feeling sad, or law enforcement. All of these associations ingrain something in our brains that instill a certain feeling.
B I’m going to bet you’re some variety of scientist. For this example, blue experiences marvelously inconsistent usage. It can mean a general decrease or lower value, a high pressure system on a meteorological map, specific values relating to water, low density in any medical imaging technology, and so on. I’ll go even further and assume you visualized the purest form of blue we tend to see, which is naturally the eye-blinding “high blue” or #0000FF, commonly available in such storied programs as Microsoft Paint and the default color of links in a tragically unstyled website (you know the ones).
C If you answered C…you might be confused. Congratulations! You’re looking at the strange, vague line that I — as a designer of scientific visualization — walk on a daily basis.
Welcome to the struggle of designing a graphic that charts a decrease in Arctic sea ice that viewers inevitably feel reflects an increase in Arctic sea ice — because blue is cold and ice is kind of blue, right? Or when a weather mass on a map looks blue and someone tentatively thinks that it must be raining there, rather in the giant deep red mass swirling over a tropical storm.
Which is, of course, not to say that any of those assumptions are bad. It just represents a fundamental breakdown of communication between data providers and a consuming audience.
Can I say that again?
Those assumptions aren’t bad, and if you chose A, B, or C, you didn’t fail the test.
Here at NEMAC, I make up the entirety of our design department. I’m art director, branding intern, web design specialist, print guru, and logo designer, all rolled into one package. My background is in interactive design and illustration, so I’m a bit of an outsider among our roster of scientists.
That means I’m one of you who answered A to that first question, and I’m mixed in with a bunch of B’s who make up our team. (Excepting, of course, our humanities-backgrounded editor, Nina Flagler Hall. Hi, Nina! I think Nina is probably a C.) The dissonance between aesthetic and deliberate data presentation used to stress me out, but I’ve realized over the years that learning to walk that bridge from scientists to the public has given me a unique perspective on how to communicate.
One of the first assumptions we all have to tackle is realizing that not everyone has the same point of view.
I remember vividly, in my first year here, I proposed a color scheme for four categories of an index we created to map out challenges in the 27 counties of Western North Carolina. One category was the human environment, and a colleague innocently suggested using the color red. My brain immediately conjured up images of the Red Cross logo, hospitals, budgets “in the red,” alarm, Red 40, “seeing red,” politics, and so on. Red may be one of the most human colors, but it rarely implies something good happening. I gently suggested a plum purple instead, and we went from there. But that instant was when I realized how differently we approached the same subject matter, and how my skills could find a productive niche. (I know, I know — purple can have hang-ups that are just as tricky, but at least enraged bulls don’t get baited with it.)
Coming from an aesthetic background, I’m used to picking color combinations that suit an emotional need rather than a purely informational one. Sometimes you want the muted elegance of grays and a brave splash of bright robin’s egg blue, or the vibrant urgency of red blazing against dark midnight purple, or the by-now commonplace movie poster scheme of teal and orange.
That sort of intuitive color selection serves illustration and narrative exploration, but scientific presentation demands something careful on a completely different level. Everything means something, beyond symbolizing a hero’s journey or the struggle of good and evil. Data can be intimidating, exclusive, and/or literally inaccessible to an audience. There’s a combined culture of fear and scorn around data that represents a fundamental separation between the population who rarely finds the opportunity to relate scientific information to their personal lives and those who swim in it on a daily basis.
For me, the scientific world introduced the challenges of making graphics readable and meaningful in grayscale or to a colorblind audience, or easy to print and put in workbooks for a community workshop, or even just to avoid sensitivities. (Logo for a drought-oriented research effort? Maybe skip the green accent.)
It’s less designing to evoke emotion and more designing to best serve the data — and the audience.
Which isn’t to say I didn’t think about the relatability of my craft before working in data presentation, but there’s definitely a difference between wanting a visual story to appeal to someone and wanting someone to understand what their projected temperature increase for the next ten years could be.
What I’ve come to understand isn’t that I’m a stranger in a strange land as this A among B’s — I’m just one who has traveled across the bridge.
And now I’m equipped to help others find their way.
Some helpful resources on your journey:
Maze graphics from Vectorstock; brain illustration from Shutterstock.
