Everyday Data Visualization

6 Creating a good chart

This chapter covers

• Making a “good” chart
• Bar chart alternatives that are a bit more interesting
• Map visualizations that don’t secretly tell a different story without your consent

Let’s look at the tools in our tool belt, the hammers and power drills of making a viz, if you will. We have the preattentive attributes of color, form, and spatial position (also movement, but we’ll leave that one out for now). This means we can encode data using color, shape, size, and position, and then we can encode relationships between our data points using the gestalt principles of enclosure, proximity, similarity, symmetry, connection, closure, and continuity. We have all different types and categorizations of data, and we have the ...