Designing a Visualization
Mark Stacey, Joe Salvatore, Adam Jorgensen · Visual Intelligence · 2013
Designing visualization is not a simple case of picking one from the list that a tool supports. The right visualization conveys the right message, whereas the wrong visualization might confuse the message you are trying to send, or even convey the wrong message. Knowing and taking into account perceptual differences are key to creating visualizations that communicate the intended message. The most important pitfall is context—the shapes around a visualization may distort the message of the visualization. Visualizations answer questions by highlighting patterns and outliers. Perspective and shape may appear different, but in the two-dimensional visualization, shape is the only way to show perspective. There are many ways to use shape in visualizations. The one you will be most familiar with is to use the shape of an object as it appears in the physical world as a representation.