Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Reaction:Understanding Charts and Graphs

As the name suggests this article shows the effective way of designing charts and graphs and helps the reader understand the difference between a good and a bad graph design. Charts and graphs are definitely one of the best and the oldest forms of effective data visualizations and they do convey the information quite accurately.

The article begins with the author stating various design flaws that exist in the graphical representations. And then he gives an outline on the various ways in which graphs can be represented ie lines, boxes, bars, etc.

This article is mainly divided into three categories that explain the analytics, evaluation procedure and designing principles in detail.

The author has stressed a lot on the designing principles and issues and has also listed the violations by giving an example(figure 3). I think it is really important to follow certain principles while designing a graph as it was also explained in the white paper 'effectively representing quantitative values'. If all the principles are taken into account while designing then it sort of guarantees the correctness of our visualization and also makes it a lot easier to convey the desired information to others.

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