- David McCandless turns complex data sets (like worldwide military spending, media buzz, Facebook status updates) into beautiful, simple diagrams that tease out unseen patterns and connections. Good design, he suggests, is the best way to navigate information glut.
- We visualise information so that we can see the patterns and connections that matter and then designing that information, so it makes more sense and so a story can be told from it. It also allows us to focus only on the information that’s important.
- Visualisations can be meaningless without context. Adding context gives you a different relationship to the numbers. You start to see patterns and connections between numbers that would otherwise be scattered across multiple news reports.
- When looking for hidden patterns in the data the best way to discover them is when you visualise it.
- If you’re navigating through dense information, coming across a beautiful graphic or data visualisation is a relief.
- Humans sense of sight is the fastest, then your sense of touch, and then you have hearing and smell.
- The eye is exquisitely sensitive to patterns in variations in colour, shape and pattern. It’s the language of the eye. If you combine the language of the eye with the language of the mind, which is about words and numbers and concepts, you start speaking two languages simultaneously, each enhancing the other.
- It’s a way of squeezing an enormous amount of information and understanding into a small space. And once you’ve curated that data, and cleaned that data, you can do cool stuff with it.
- Design is about solving problems and providing elegant solutions, while information design is about solving information problems.
- Visualising information can give us a very quick solution to those kinds of problems. Even when the information is terrible, the visual can be quite beautiful. Often, we can get clarity or the answer to a simple question very quickly.
Reflection
In summary, David McCandless explains the beauty of data and how using information design can solidify enormous amounts of information into more understanding simplistic visualisations. Visualisations can be meaningless without context. Adding context gives you a different relationship to the numbers. We need to ensure that we are creating visualisations that have some sort of context to allow the readers to understand the entirely of a visualisation.
the art of data 