Review: Better Data Visualizations

I ran across Jon Schwabish’s book, Better Data Visualizations, when my editor pointed out how uncomfortably close it looked to an unused cover design for Better Posters.

Once I finished smiling at the “separated at birth” similarities, I realized I should actually read Jon’s book because it was, as they say, “relevant to my interests.”

Better Data Visualizations is very useful.

The bulk of the book is a big ol’ list of different graph types. The charts range from the common (bar charts, scatter plots, and tables) to the more esoteric (Voronoi diagrams, Marimekko charts). It’s not quite an “encyclopedia of charts,” but it is thorough.

There are usually multiple illustrations (in full colour) of each type of chart so you can see them “in action,” as it were. Almost all the illustrations are in full colour.

Every entry has a series of tips of how to avoid pitfalls and maximize the effectiveness of that particular chart type. I particularly appreciated the concise guidelines for making tables presentable. 

Readers of this blog who work in the humanities occasionally ask about techniques for their fields. If that is an interest of yours, you’ll be pleased to know Schwabish has a section on qualitative visualizations. It is slimmer than the section on quantitative visualizations, but given that this is an area that is often ignored completely, this is an extremely welcome addition to this book.

There is a section showing “before and after” revisions of charts that is quite fun.

Lastly, there is a section on developing a style guide. While this is aimed at organizations that make a lot of charts, I realized that it could be extremely helpful for a poster maker to draw up a short style guide for their poster. One of the biggest problems I see on posters is inconsistency. This is usually because people use different software tools for different parts of the poster, and they don’t check to harmonize the graphs and the rest of the poster.

While I was reading, I was wondering, “But how could someone know how to make some of these non-standard charts?” While the appendices are often considered to be extra material that can be removed, the appendix on data visualization tools was extremely helpful for me. (“Microsoft has a graphing site called Charticulator? Cool.”)

Because data visualizations are often the heart of conference posters, there is definitely some overlap in Jon’s book and mine. But Better Data Visualization covers much more territory there than mine does.

External links

PolicyViz

Related posts

Solving the Pokemon problem for posters

Bad poster bingo

Play it at your next conference! Click to enlarge.

At most conferences, the game is not whether you can get a bingo, it’s whether you can do it on a single poster...

External links

Bad presentation bingo

Neuroscience 2011: advice in advance

This week, I shall be at the annual Neuroscience meeting, which is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, scientific conferences, in the world.




A huge number of posters will be put together and printed this week. For those who do not want to have to dig through the last two and a half years of posts, here is a super quick guide to making your poster better.

The big tips

Shut up.

People want to read as little as possible. And at Neuroscience, who can blame them? There is more than any person can see, and big blocks of text scream, “This is going to take a long time!”

Show images whenever possible, especially pictures. Pictures of actual physical objects that people can recognize are always more inviting than graphs, which are generic and abstract.

Do your audience a favour: respect their time. Leave the fiddly bits for your dissertation or published paper.

Line up.

For the love of humanity, make a grid. Divide your poster up into evenly spaced pieces. Draw lines. Make every piece of text, every chart, every thing line up along those lines. Don’t just stick things here and there, or make them “almost” align. It looks sloppy.

Size up.

Make everything bigger. The text. The space between each line of text. The graphs. The labels on the graphs. Large size is a key factor in how long people will look at something. How do you know if it’s big enough? Does your poster pass the arm’s length test?

Free up.

Drawing boxes around everything is like putting your poster in prison. Solitary confinement is cruel. When your poster is well organized, all you need is white space to separate the sections.

Those are my main requests that can help make most posters better. Even I, with a lot of posters under my belt, forget these basics sometimes.

The next tips are things that can be ignored with a little practice and thought, but are good places to start.

You can’t go too far wrong with...

Black text on a white background

Black text on a white background works. You can do cool things with backgrounds if know what you are doing, but it’s easy to turn something looks horrible on a printed page. Most people should put away the gradient fills and the photo blow-ups, and stick with the tried and true colour scheme that you see in 99% of all books.

A three column layout

Photographers learned long ago that dividing things into three is pleasing. For big, wide posters, like Neuroscience, three columns may be too wide. If that’s the case, either create an odd number of columns (five or seven), or subdivide your grid into smaller sections.

Sans serif typeface for the main text

Some suggestions for typefaces that are fairly easily available include Helvetica, Arial, Verdana, Tahoma, Gill Sans, and Calibri. You may think these are boring because everyone uses them, but there is a reason people use them so much: they get the job done.

Personally, I like Gill Sans on posters. Its readability holds up at a distance.

Calibri – while a fine typeface – does convey a subtle message: “I can’t be bothered to change the default settings in Microsoft Office.”

And finally:

No frickin’ Comic Sans

Comic Sans says, “amateur.” You might be going for “humourous” or “approachable,” but you achieve that at the complete loss of the “professional” trait.

I’m not against fonts with a hand-drawn look. I am a big comic book fan. Many people could make their posters better by learning the lessons of comic books. But there are better comic book typefaces out there.

Do you have a poster at Neuroscience that you are proud of? Want to show it off? Get feedback? Or just chat? Email me! I will be at Neuroscience from Saturday, 12 November, to Monday, 14 November (and maybe part of Tuesday morning).

Unabashed plug! If this helped you, please consider supporting my scientific research.

Posters as whiteboards

The Poster Session blog (commercial site) notes that you can write on some laminated posters with dry erase markers.

This opens up interesting  possibilities. You can leave space on your poster where you can write in discussions. You could leave diagrams unfinished, then draw on the poster to show relationships as you’re giving the poster.

I’m looking through you

A coloured background can make a poster pop – when done carefully.

To make a coloured background work, pick your figures carefully. These are the big three pixel-based image formats.

JPG: This is the most popular and familiar format. It is used on the web routinely because it has a wider color range than previous formats (24 bit), and generally has smaller file sizes than other formats.

GIF: This format is older than JPG. It can’t render as many colours as a JPG (8 bit). You can also create short animated images in GIF format, though you couldn’t use that on a poster.

PNG: This GIF successor can render 24 bit colour.

One important difference between these formats is transparency. Here’s a demonstration:

The JPG on the left looks shoddy compared to the GIF on the right.

JPG images can’t do transparencies. Every pixel must be coloured. Images that fine against a white background, like a white sheet of paper, can suddenly be floating in a white rectangle on top of your beautiful poster background. And suddenly, you have started down the road to boxism.

GIF and PNG images can do transparencies, which can allow any underlying colour to show through. It’s not automatic; you do have to watch the setting when you’re saving the image.

If you have an existing JPG that you like, one workaround is to match the space around your image with your poster background. This isn’t difficult if you have a simple background colour, but quickly becomes a headache if you want textured or shaded background.

But if you’re going to go to that much effort to edit the picture, you might as well mask out the background areas, then save a copy in PNG format. This can take a little fiddling in your graphics editor to do, but the result is worth it.



Related posts

Will it scale?
Never let them see your pixels

External links

Wednesday Surgery on Jim Campbell’s Comic Book Lettering Blog

Boxism

Boxes, more boxes, boxes within boxes, and boxes everywhere!

People making research posters seem to be obsessed with boxes. Walk through a poster session and you’ll find poster after poster where each section, sometimes each figure, is set apart by big, thick, heavy boxes.

Then there are those who draw a box around the entire poster, a box around the text column of the poster, a box around each graph of the poster, and the effect is much like staring at an image of a video camera pointed at its own monitor, a tunnel into some unknown dimension...

Don’t believe me? Here are just a few examples, picked because they were near the front of ePosters and the Pimp My Poster Flickr group. These are not particularly extreme examples; I just grabbed them to indicate how pervasive the drawing of boxes is.

Let’s start with this award-winning poster on ePosters (click to enlarge).

The boxes around the graphs are more subtle, because there is not a line around them, but the white against the coloured background still creates a box around the graph.

Here’s one from the Pimp My Poster group (click to enlarge).

These posters both have other issues besides the relentless boxism, but those are other issues for other times.

And just for the heck of it, one more from Some Beans, which doesn’t need my callouts to point out the box obsession:

Imagine how this blog would look if every paragraph was contained in its own little box. It wouldn’t be much fun to read.

Many posters would be substantially improved just by taking away the boxes, and using white space to separate everything instead of lines.

Boxes are usually a last-gasp attempt to enforce some sort of order upon a chaotic layout. Excessive use of boxes betrays the designer’s lack of a plan or a lack of confidence. To avoid descending into a Russian doll of boxes:

1. Start with a simple grid. Try three equal columns if flummoxed.
2. Make the margins between the columns wide. Clearly defined margins will help guide people in which way to read.
3. Make your material fit the grid; don’t change the grid to fit the material. You may have to go back and redo graphs to different proportions.

Boxes can be used to good effect. Boxes around entire columns, or callouts of highlights, can be attractive. But every single element does not have to be contained in its own box.

The background

Most documents have a few core elements that they share, like words and pictures. One is so basic that it’s easy to overlook: the background, or the blank page, that you’ll be working on.

There are a couple of basic questions to ask about your background.

First, how big will it be?

There are usually two factors that go into answering this question. One is how big the conference’s poster boards will be. Conference organizers are usually very good about making this information available at the outset. The other is determined by how you plan to physically print the poster. If you are planning on using a plotter printer that prints on 36 or 42 inch rolls of paper, don't plan on making a poster that is 48 inches high.

Second, what colour will be it? In the vast majority of cases, the answer should be, “White.”

Many people fear black on white is boring, and want to make something more “eye-catching.” This often results in disaster. This may be a good time to bring in a guideline for making posters for presentations.

Never do anything that interferes with communication.

I am a big believer that people should make beautiful, gorgeous, luscious conference posters. I want to write a lot in this blog about how to make the most attractive posters possible. Nevertheless, communication should always be the first, most important goal of a poster.

If this means that the poster looks “boring,” this may not be a bad thing. Think about your favourite book. The way it is laid out on the inside is probably pretty boring. There is a reason that most books are printed with black text on a white background: it just works.