Killer Visual Strategies

CHAPTER 10RULE 7: USE PROPER DATA VIZ THROUGHOUT

Figure 10.1

—Brian Fantana “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”

Whether in school or in the workplace, the majority of us have had to either read or create charts and graphs at some point in our lives. This graphic representation of data, called “data visualization” or “data viz,” has been our go-to method for understanding how numbers correlate to one another for centuries. In fact, the first-ever line and bar graphs were developed as early as 1786, when William Playfair released The Commercial and Political Atlas.

Playfair wanted to compare the total amount of exports to the total amount of imports in Scotland over a single-year period (from 1780 to 1781), broken down by source/destination. To chart total numbers, identify locations, and differentiate imports from exports, he realized that a combination of bars and scales would do the trick. The result was the first recorded bar graph in history, pictured in Figure 10.2.

Figure 10.2 []

At the time, Playfair was navigating uncharted waters, but today, charts and graphs are extremely commonplace. Over the years, tools such as Excel, Tableau, and PowerPoint have made it extremely easy for us to quickly visualize data sets and share them widely.

Given this, you might ...