Information Visualization

5 min readSep 29, 2015

The Internet is full of useless information, disguised in beautiful and pseudo-scientific visuals. Search for “infographics” on Pinterest and this becomes very apparent. It’s kinda sad because succeeding in information visualization is not that hard. You’ll just need to keep a few things in mind. This article is a quick beginners primer to get started with the art of meaningful information design.

Content and goal

Cosmetic decoration, which frequently distorts the data, will never salvage an underlying lack of content. — Edward Tufte

Your message needs to be relevant for the user or target group. Otherwise your commucation is wasted. So before you fire up Illustrator, devote some time answer these five questions:

What are the real goals of the communication?
What is the core insight you’re communicating
Who are you communicating with?
Why is your insight relevant to the target person or group?
Where, when and how the communication occurs?

Pick the right tool

Good design is a lot like clear thinking made visual. — Edward Tufte

Bar chart is a stronger tool for comparison than pie chart. Our brains are more suited for comparing lenghts than areas.

Choose the tools and level of visuality to suit the context. If you want to provide accurate information, don’t push too much visual eye candy. If you’re designing an engaging ad, you’ll probably need some kick-ass graphics.

Tools for visualizations

Bar chart, Histogram, Line chart

Function graph, Area chart, Scatter plot

Bubble chart, Cartogram, Flow chart

Venn diagram, Pie chart, Radar chart

If you want to communicate, think of your visualizations not as art, but as tools for understanding. — Alberto Cairo

Gestalt principles

Gestalt psychology holds a set of descriptive principles about how we visually perceive objects. These principles are in action in nearly everything we do graphically as designers.

Similarity: Elements that share similar characteristics are perceived as more related than elements that don’t share those characteristics.

Proximity: Objects that are closer together are perceived as more related than objects that are further apart.

Connectedness: Elements that are visually connected are perceived as more related than elements with no connection.

Continuity: Elements arranged on a line or curve are perceived as more related than elements not on the line or curve.

Closure: When looking at a complex arrangement of individual elements, humans tend to first look for a single, recognizable pattern.

Common fate: Elements that move in the same direction are perceived as more related than elements that are stationary or that move in different directions.