Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Vary color and
stroke styles to
emphasize the
parts in your
graphic that are
most important
to the story
you're telling.
FIGurE 4-51 Fitted LOeSS curve with less smoothness and higher degree polynomial
To get to the final graphic in Figure 4-47, save the image as a PDF and
bring it into Illustrator. The same tools (for example, Selection, Type, Pen)
are used to add titles, a background, and ticks for a horizontal axis. The
fitted line was made more prominent to place more focus on the trends
than on the individual data points.
Wrapping up
It's fun to explore patterns over time. Time is so embedded in our day-
to-day life that so many aspects of visualizing temporal data are fairly
intuitive. You understand things changing and evolving—the hard part is
figuring out by how much and learning what to look for in your graphs.
It's easy to glance over some lines on a plot and say something is increas-
ing, and that's good. That's what visualization is for—to quickly get a gen-
eral view of your data. But you can take it further. You can use visualization
as an exploratory tool. Zoom in on sections of time and question why there
was a small blip on some day but nowhere else or why there was a spike
on a different day. That's when data is fun and interesting—the more you
know about your data, the better story you can tell.
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