The majority of graphs and slides you see from us here feature plain, white backgrounds. While that’s a typical situation when communicating, it certainly isn’t the only one. At times, you might choose or be required to use something less—what’s a good word—empty? Minimalist? Dare I say it…boring? Perhaps you are interested in designing something with a bold background. Or maybe you’re required to use the company template, which features a colorful logo and other background elements that demand attention before you’ve added anything else to the slide. In both cases, this can be a surmountable ..read more

Have you ever found yourself staring at a graph or slide, wondering what the creator was trying to convey? Perhaps you've sat through a presentation, only to be left scratching your head, unsure of what to do next. Don’t put your audience in this same uncomfortable position. Instead, connect the dots for them to make it clear what the point is and what action they should take. When you fail to explicitly state the purpose of your communication, you run the risk of the important insight being lost, or someone arriving at the wrong conclusion. Let's consider an example. Imagine you're a project ..read more

Very early in my career, I was a front-end developer, working in a department with software engineers and video editors. The department director, Jim, was many things—a fantastic mentor, a fierce advocate, a voice of reason—but his background didn’t include software coding or video production. Before stepping into a leadership role, he had been a draftsman, leveraging his degree and decades of expertise in mechanical drawing to create technical visualizations. I was born in the absolute middle of Generation X, I had never known a business environment where visuals weren’t created with softwar ..read more

    The visualisation tools we have at our disposal do a great job of summarising our data. We can aggregate it ourselves with formulas (like averages, counts or sums) or we can let a viewer apply filters to customise the view. These techniques can make a visual more digestible for our audience. Occasionally, we might find it tempting to share all of the data in its purest form, with no aggregation or restriction. In most cases, it doesn’t make practical sense to share all this information in one visualisation.  (A good friend once told me—when I tried to visualise every profes ..read more

I’ve always had a fascination with the discipline of “wayfinding,” which is a term describing the ways architects, city planners, designers, and artists make it as easy as possible for people to navigate unfamiliar places. Think back to the last time you visited an amusement park, attended a sporting event or large concert, or passed through an airport or a public transportation system. These venues are visited by tens of thousands of people in a single day, many of whom have never been there before. For the enjoyment and safety of everyone, it’s critical (and, in many cases, legally required ..read more

A tip I regularly share when providing data visualization feedback is to use multiple graphs instead of packing several series into a single chart. Although it is important to be concise, people are often surprised to hear that when it comes to the number of graphs we share, fewer isn't always better. Let's consider an example. A project manager is overseeing the final stages of an effort to implement a large number of feature requests for their software. The team aims to tackle the backlog of request tickets by the end of the year. They update their progress at a bi-monthly meeting, starting ..read more

The other day I was watching the recent Apple-produced movie Napoleon, featuring Joaquin Phoenix as Napoleon Bonaparte and Vanessa Kirby as his first wife Joséphine.  I’m not a history buff by any means, but I have a passing knowledge of the French Revolution and of Napoleon’s brief reign in the early 19th century. While I did not necessarily know the details of each step in his various conquests and power consolidations, I was aware that the decision to invade Russia would be disastrous for Bonaparte.   How did I know this? It’s because one of the world’s most famous data visua ..read more

When you’re visualizing categorical data, sorting the bars in your chart is usually a straightforward task. Or is it? In most cases, you probably take the category with the largest value and stick that in the prime spot, the leftmost slot on the horizontal axis. Then, you proceed from left to right in descending order of value. Easy peasy.   OK, sure, sometimes you want to emphasize a metric where a lower value is better or more important, and in that case you might sort by ascending bar values instead.   Or perhaps you have a large number of categories, and you want to make it eas ..read more

Getting your audience’s attention and focusing it well are critical components of building a successful data communication. While there are several ways to capture attention, the two techniques we find most effective—and the ones we talk about the most—are:  employ words more thoughtfully, and more liberally, in support of our graphs; and apply color more sparingly but intentionally to make the important elements of your visual stand out. However, the context in which our messages are presented dramatically influences the amount of attention we need to compete for. As you can imagin ..read more

When you're tasked with putting together a presentation, it's often expected that you’ll kick things off with an overview slide. Think of it as a quick peek at what's coming up, giving everyone at the meeting the same expectations for what details you’ll eventually cover. But here's the catch: it's easy to get so caught up in building out the meat of your presentation, or to have a laundry list of other tasks that need attention, that the overview slide gets shortchanged. If you leave that slide for the last minute, treat it as something you just have to get out of the way, or just update a fe ..read more