- Know the main design principles
- Develop your intuition to recognize smart visualizations
What is design?
Design is not just the action of rendering something pretty. It’s a whole process: noticing pains and problems, making our life easier, creating users exepriences… and in our case, making the audience look at our visuals, feel something… and do something!
Recommended video What is design? (very provocative talk, indeed!!! ;-) When the designer featured in this video talks about engineers, he calls them "cogs", i.e. one of the tooth-like parts around the edge of a wheel in a machine. And more, he says engineers can't even distinguish a lounge chair designed to feel comfortable from a "two-bit piece from IKEA". Of course, it is provocation, but isn't he right? A chart is not just a way to plot data. There are many many charts. Each one should have a purpose, and would generate emotions and reactions. Let's think like designer! Who will see our graph? Why, when, where, what for?
Basic Design Principales
In this course, you will review everything you have seen before: taking into account the context, choosing an effective visual, eliminating clutter and focus you audience’s attention..
We will now try to get out of this analytical approach and take the designer’s posture by trying to take the user’s point of view.
To do this, you will apply basic design principles to produce and recognize good visualizations. These principles includes affordances, accessibility and aesthetics.
Recommended reading Think like a designer (chapter 5), Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
To go further
Recommended video Being Clever with Color by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, 2015
Recommended video The first secret of design is ... noticing by Tony Fadell, former engineer at Apple responsible of the design and production of the iPod. TED2015. https://www.ted.com/talks/tony_fadell_the_first_secret_of_design_is_noticing/. His advice (and Steve Jobs' also): Act as a beginner to experience a product/chart as our audience would do. "We all saw the world more clearly when we saw it for the first time, before a lifetime of habits got in the way. Our challenge is to get back there, to feel that frustration, to see those little details, to look broader, look closer, and to think younger so we can stay beginners".