Conceiving and Reasoning Visualization Design Options - Data Visualization: A Successful Design Process - page 109

• Data sources : It is vital to include detailed references about from where you
have accessed your data or any other sourced element (such as imagery).
Where you have chance to offer a more detailed narrative, you may wish to
explain what treatment you have applied to the data in terms of its quality or
analytical transformation.
• Attribution : Don't forget to acknowledge those who have either contributed
directly, influenced the construction of the design, or those people whose
work has acted as a source inspiration.
The final thing to mention about annotation is that this is likely to be the first time
we have to consider our typography selections. There are, of course, plenty of
established guides and sources of literature to help influence your choice of fonts for
all pieces of written annotation. However, this is another aspect of design that you
will be able to ultimately judge best using your own design instinct. Many designers
have their favorites and like to maintain this identity but also many projects may be
required to observe certain visual identity rules like we outlined in the color section.
Arrangement
You have established how you are going to represent your data, you've identified your
visual identity through color, the choices around static or interactive design have been
rationalized, and you have identified the range of annotation requirements.
For our final layer, we need to consider how to arrange our design in terms of the
layout, placement, and organization of all visible elements. How can we piece
everything together most effectively?
As we've just discussed in relation to annotation, our intention with the arrangement
and architecture of our design is to deliver as intuitive an experience as possible. The
level of intuitiveness and smooth access into the subject matter is strongly influenced
by the logic and implied meaning behind the arrangement of our chart elements, the
interactive features, and annotation devices.
The key overall aim is to reduce the amount of work the eye has to undertake to
navigate around the design and to decipher the sequence and hierarchy of the
display. For the brain, once again, we're looking to minimize the amount of thinking
and "working out" that goes on. We therefore need to carefully consider the choices
we make around the size, positioning, grouping, and sorting of all that we show. As
with all visualization design layers, we need to be able to justify the decisions we
make about every visible property presented.
Here is a simple, but effective, demonstration of the careful consideration of
arrangement. It is just one example out of many we could refer to from the projects
shown in this topic.