VisualPoint

“In the JunkCharts Trifecta checkup, we reserve a corner for “data”. The data used in a chart must be in harmony with the question being addressed, as well as the chart type being selected.”

 

“When people think about data, they often think cleaning the data, processing the data but what comes before that is collecting the data — specifically, collecting data that directly address the question at hand.”

“Over the last few years I’ve created a few popular visualizations, a lot of duds, and I’ve learned a few lessons along the way.

For my latest analysis of where Facebook users go on vacation, I decided to document the steps I follow to build my visualizations . It’s a very rough guide, these are just stages I’ve learned to follow by trial and error, but following these guidelines is a good way to start if you’re looking to create your first visualization.”

“Information architecture can be a daunting subject for designers who’ve never tried it before.

 

Below are a collection of resources to get you going down the information architecture and data visualization path. Whether you just want to become more familiar with infographics and data visualizations for occasional use or are thinking of making it a career, the resources below will surely come in handy. There are also some beautiful examples and more roundups to see even more fantastic graphics.”

“One of the most common question I am asked these days is what sort of data visualisation I like the most.

It is clearly a very open-ended question and one that is hard to satisfactorily answer on the spot without later thinking more deeply and wishing to refine your response. Indeed, forming a pure and consistent conviction about what you like is difficult (for some) especially in such a rapidly growing and evolving field like data visualisation.”

“We live in a mediated world, where everything from television and internet usage to snack food purchases is measured, quantified and dissected. The challenge is to make data tell a story, conveying what’s most important effectively and efficiently. Nielsen, a global leader in measurement and information, is searching for innovators – passionate designers at the intersection of art and science – to compete in creating the most insightful, beautiful and intuitive visualizations of some of our data.”

“300.000 Norwegians move house every year. If the pattern made by their journeys could be compressed into one short animation, what would it look like? What would someone seeing it be able to learn, if anything?

Deluge is a C++ application designed to answer these questions. The underlying data was generated by cross referencing 8 million tax records from 2006 and 2007 to track changes in postal codes.”

“Involvement, motivation and narrative: here’s how the key concepts of game design and 3D learning environments can be successfully applied to the field of data visualization.”

“Data presentation can be beautiful, elegant and descriptive. There is a variety of conventional ways to visualize data – tables, histograms, pie charts and bar graphs are being used every day, in every project and on every possible occasion. However, to convey a message to your readers effectively, sometimes you need more than just a simple pie chart of your results. In fact, there are much better, profound, creative and absolutely fascinating ways to visualize data. Many of them might become ubiquitous in the next few years.”

Use this table to figure out what type of information visualisation would be most suited to your project.

“Information graphics, visual representations of data known as infographics, keep the web going these days. Web users, with their diminishing attention spans, are inexorably drawn to these shiny, brightly coloured messages with small, relevant, clearly-displayed nuggets of information. They’re straight to the point, usually factually interesting and often give you a wake-up call as to what those statistics really mean.”

Simon Chadwick speaks to David McCandless about the art of data visualisation.

“I never thought much about the terminology freely thrown around in design with anything regarding infographics, data visualization or information design. This has been compounded by the popularity of infographics in major publications. As part of my research for a school project about using data and the Processing language, I felt it was important to understand the words being used in this discipline.

 In this post, I will discuss the similarities between infographics and data visualizations, the differences as well as why it may or may not matter to really understand the distinction.”

Everyone loves a good infographic. It is such an easy way to digest statistics instead of having to read endless lists of boring and confusing figures, and it.

But, what happens if you are searching for a particular visualisation, either for your article or just out of general interest? Yes, there’s the old-fashioned way of searching via Google or trawling through hundreds of sites, but surely you just want a site like Flickr where you can browse through infographics, without having to waste time searching for them?

 This is exactly what Visual.ly is. Think of it as Flickr for infographics and visualisations. Signing up is completely free and there’s some exciting features built into it (with a couple more in the pipeline).

“Hello and welcome to the world’s first global awards for data visualization and information design. We’re out to celebrate and honour the incredible creativity that’s emerging in this growing field.

 So, if you’ve created an infographic, a revealing dataviz or a beautiful piece of information art, on any subject, in any media, enter it into our awards. You could be featured on this site. You could be shortlisted. You could win an award.

 There are various categories and awards.”