Summary

This chapter has equipped you with a set of practical tools and guidelines for designing professional-looking and effective visuals to use in your daily work. We started our journey by framing the overall objective of visualizing data: transferring data-based messages to others by leveraging human visual perception. We have seen how we need to impersonate the role of a designer, who must make choices about what and how to visualize. After selecting the specific message type to give (which can be focused on evolution over time, making sense of absolute and relative size, or relation across quantities), we learned how to pick the right chart type using the chart selection matrix. We discovered pros and cons and typical pitfalls behind the implementation of line charts, bar charts, treemaps, and scatterplots, which collectively account for the vast majority of charts we need. Lastly, we went through a set of guidelines to adopt when ensuring the quality of any data visual. We...