Notes: The Visual Display of Quantitative information

Serif vs. San-serif
When comparing serif letters with san-serif, the latter provide an uneasy reading.
The Fashionable preference for sans-serif in text shows neither historical nor practical competence.

Horizontal vs. Vertical
Graphics should tend toward the horizontal, greater in length than height;
1. Our eye is naturally practiced in defecting deviation from the horizon and graphic design should take advatage of this fact.
2. It is easier to write and to read words on horizontal space.
3. Emphasis on Casual Influence. (yaxis - effect / xaxis - cause )

Unnecessary Graphics
Every bit of ink on a graphic requires a reason. And nearly always that reason should be that the ink presents new information.
Bilateral symmetry doubles the space consumed by the desin in a graphic, without adding new information.

Small Multiples & An economy of perception results
The design remains constant htrough all the frames, so that attention is devoted entirely to shifts in the data
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Once viewers decode and conprehend the design for one slice of data, they have familiar access to data in all other slices.

Golden Section / Golden Ratio
"divine division" of a line.
A length is divided such that the smaller is to the greater part as the greater is to the whole.

Moire Effects/ Moire Vibration / Moire Movement
Moire vibration is an undisciplined ambiguity, with an illusive, eye-straining quality that contaminates the entire graphic.
It has no place in data graphical design.

Graphics can be designed to have at least three viewing depths
1. What is seen from a distance, an overall structure usually aggregated from an underlying microstructure.
2. What is seen up close and in detail, the fine stducture of the data
3. What is seen implicitly, underlying the graphic - that which is behind the graphics. Share