A Practical Guide to Designing with Data
In recent years, the terms Visualization, Infographic and others have been bantered around with almost no regard to their use or meaning. There is a new vernacular emerging in the realms of data representations, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the much simpler origins and best practices of charts and graphs.
Brian Suda takes you on a journey through the basics and makes it easy to produce beautiful looking, accurate representations of data. He’ll walk you through how to visualize and design data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing.
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Look Inside
Designing with Data is a visual feast. With over 200 illustrations, Brian leads you by the hand through the early history of charts and graphs through to complex visualisations. If you need to display data in any form, you need this book.
Who should read this book?
If you've ever been asked to produce a chart or graph, you should read this book. If you're a researcher, designer, developer, UX designer, IA, product owner or web app owner you can get a lot out of this book and take your visualisations to the next level.
To put it in the real world, you could use this book for:
- designing web app dashboards
- presenting research
- visualising user activity in your web app or service
- designing complex user relationships
- creating accurate, thought-provoking presentations
- enriching your web app or service with data visualisations
If you can master the basics, then more complex designs become easier to create. In this book, you’ll learn to design charts that focus on the data, avoiding unnecessary distractions and not mis-representing the information to the readers.
This book is a practical guide to designing with data. By the end of this book, you will have a firm grasp on the types of charts, which are best at representing different types of data and how to tell your story in a beautifully elegant way.
Topics include:
Part 1 : The visual language of data
A brief history of charts and graphs; Dynamic and static charts; The Golden Ratio (and other ratios); Chart Junk.
Part 2 : Colour and ink
Data to pixel ratio; How to draw attention to the data; Using colour.
Part 3: How to deceive with data
How to (and not to) lie with data.
Part 4 : Common types of charts
Line graphs; Bar charts; Area graphs; Pie charts; Scatter plots
Part 5 : Not so common charts
Maps, choropleths and cartograms; Radar plots; Gauges and thermometers; Sound; Everything and the kitchen sink