Better Data Visualizations

Now more than ever, content must be visual if it is to travel far. Readers everywhere are overwhelmed with a flow of data, news, and text. Visuals can cut through the noise and make it easier for readers to recognize and recall information. Yet many researchers were never taught how to present their work visually. This book details essential strategies to create more effective data visualizations. Jonathan Schwabish walks readers through the steps of creating better graphs and how to move beyond simple line, bar, and pie charts. Through more than five hundred examples, he demonstrates the do’s and don’ts of data visualization, the principles of visual perception, and how to make subjective style decisions around a chart’s design. Schwabish surveys more than eighty visualization types, from histograms to horizon charts, ridgeline plots to choropleth maps, and explains how each has its place in the visual toolkit. It might seem intimidating, but everyone can learn how to create compelling, effective data visualizations. This book will guide you as you define your audience and goals, choose the graph that best fits for your data, and clearly communicate your message.

Effective visualization is the best way to communicate information from the increasingly large and complex datasets in the natural and social sciences. But with the increasing power of visualization software today, scientists, engineers, and business analysts often have to navigate a bewildering array of visualization choices and options. This practical book takes you through many commonly encountered visualization problems, and it provides guidelines on how to turn large datasets into clear and compelling figures. What visualization type is best for the story you want to tell? How do you make informative figures that are visually pleasing? Author Claus O. Wilke teaches you the elements most critical to successful data visualization. Explore the basic concepts of color as a tool to highlight, distinguish, or represent a value Understand the importance of redundant coding to ensure you provide key information in multiple ways Use the book’s visualizations directory, a graphical guide to commonly used types of data visualizations Get extensive examples of good and bad figures Learn how to use figures in a document or report and how employ them effectively to tell a compelling story

NOW IN FULL COLOR! Written by sought-after speaker, designer, and researcher Stephanie D. H. Evergreen, Effective Data Visualization shows readers how to create Excel charts and graphs that best communicate their data findings. This comprehensive how-to guide functions as a set of blueprints—supported by both research and the author’s extensive experience with clients in industries all over the world—for conveying data in an impactful way. Delivered in Evergreen’s humorous and approachable style, the book covers the spectrum of graph types available beyond the default options, how to determine which one most appropriately fits specific data stories, and easy steps for building the chosen graph in Excel. Now in full color with new examples throughout, the Second Edition includes a revamped chapter on qualitative data, nine new quantitative graph types, new shortcuts in Excel, and an entirely new chapter on Sharing Your Data With the World, which provides advice on using dashboards. New from Stephanie Evergreen! The Data Visualization Sketchbook provides advice on getting started with sketching and offers tips, guidance, and completed sample sketches for a number of reporting formats. Bundle Effective Data Visualization, 2e, and The Data Visualization Sketchbook, using ISBN 978-1-5443-7178-8!

Not a data expert? Here’s an engaging and entertaining guide to interpreting and drawing insights from any chart, graph, or other data visualization you’ll encounter. You’re a business professional, not a data scientist. How do you make heads or tails of the data visualizations that come across your desk—let alone make critical business decisions based on the information they’re designed to convey? In The Big Picture, top data visualization consultant Steve Wexler provides the tools for developing the graphical literacy you need to understand the data visualizations that are flooding your inbox—and put that data to use. Packed with the best four-color examples created in Excel, Tableau, Power BI, and Qlik, among others, this one-stop resource empowers you to extract the most important information from data visualizations quickly and accurately, act on key insights, solve problems, and make the right decisions for your organization every time.

An accessible primer on how to create effective graphics from data This book provides students and researchers a hands-on introduction to the principles and practice of data visualization. It explains what makes some graphs succeed while others fail, how to make high-quality figures from data using powerful and reproducible methods, and how to think about data visualization in an honest and effective way. Data Visualization builds the reader’s expertise in ggplot2, a versatile visualization library for the R programming language. Through a series of worked examples, this accessible primer then demonstrates how to create plots piece by piece, beginning with summaries of single variables and moving on to more complex graphics. Topics include plotting continuous and categorical variables; layering information on graphics; producing effective “small multiple” plots; grouping, summarizing, and transforming data for plotting; creating maps; working with the output of statistical models; and refining plots to make them more comprehensible. Effective graphics are essential to communicating ideas and a great way to better understand data. This book provides the practical skills students and practitioners need to visualize quantitative data and get the most out of their research findings. Provides hands-on instruction using R and ggplot2 Shows how the “tidyverse” of data analysis tools makes working with R easier and more consistent Includes a library of data sets, code, and functions

Don't simply show your data—tell a story with it! Storytelling with Data teaches you the fundamentals of data visualization and how to communicate effectively with data. You'll discover the power of storytelling and the way to make data a pivotal point in your story. The lessons in this illuminative text are grounded in theory, but made accessible through numerous real-world examples—ready for immediate application to your next graph or presentation. Storytelling is not an inherent skill, especially when it comes to data visualization, and the tools at our disposal don't make it any easier. This book demonstrates how to go beyond conventional tools to reach the root of your data, and how to use your data to create an engaging, informative, compelling story. Specifically, you'll learn how to: Understand the importance of context and audience Determine the appropriate type of graph for your situation Recognize and eliminate the clutter clouding your information Direct your audience's attention to the most important parts of your data Think like a designer and utilize concepts of design in data visualization Leverage the power of storytelling to help your message resonate with your audience Together, the lessons in this book will help you turn your data into high impact visual stories that stick with your audience. Rid your world of ineffective graphs, one exploding 3D pie chart at a time. There is a story in your data—Storytelling with Data will give you the skills and power to tell it!

Whether you are a university professor, researcher at a think tank, graduate student, or analyst at a private firm, chances are that at some point you have presented your work in front of an audience. Most of us approach this task by converting a written document into slides, but the result is often a text-heavy presentation saddled with bullet points, stock images, and graphs too complex for an audience to decipher—much less understand. Presenting is fundamentally different from writing, and with only a little more time, a little more effort, and a little more planning, you can communicate your work with force and clarity. Designed for presenters of scholarly or data-intensive content, Better Presentations details essential strategies for developing clear, sophisticated, and visually captivating presentations. Following three core principles—visualize, unify, and focus—Better Presentations describes how to visualize data effectively, find and use images appropriately, choose sensible fonts and colors, edit text for powerful delivery, and restructure a written argument for maximum engagement and persuasion. With a range of clear examples for what to do (and what not to do), the practical package offered in Better Presentations shares the best techniques to display work and the best tactics for winning over audiences. It pushes presenters past the frustration and intimidation of the process to more effective, memorable, and persuasive presentations.

In Data Sketches, Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu document the deeply creative process behind 24 unique data visualization projects, and they combine this with powerful technical insights which reveal the mindset behind coding creatively. Exploring 12 different themes – from the Olympics to Presidents & Royals and from Movies to Myths & Legends – each pair of visualizations explores different technologies and forms, blurring the boundary between visualization as an exploratory tool and an artform in its own right. This beautiful book provides an intimate, behind-the-scenes account of all 24 projects and shares the authors’ personal notes and drafts every step of the way. The book features: Detailed information on data gathering, sketching, and coding data visualizations for the web, with screenshots of works-in-progress and reproductions from the authors’ notebooks Never-before-published technical write-ups, with beginner-friendly explanations of core data visualization concepts Practical lessons based on the data and design challenges overcome during each project Full-color pages, showcasing all 24 final data visualizations This book is perfect for anyone interested or working in data visualization and information design, and especially those who want to take their work to the next level and are inspired by unique and compelling data-driven storytelling.