Data is Your Message Video: Choosing the Right Style
“Above all else show the data. Graphical excellence is the well-designed presentation of interesting data
– – a matter of substance, of statistics, and of design.” 1
Data is your message. Design should serve only to make understanding the data easy.
Guides to good design emphasize simplicity. This may encourage people to simplify the data, not the design.
Perhaps “elegant” is a better guide. Elegant refers to exercising “a nice choice … characterized by … refinement, and the absence of every thing offensive.”2 In our case, offensive means distracting the eye from the data. Edward Tufte, renowned expert in information design, advocates high “data-ink ratio”—that “a large share of the ink [or pixels] on a graphic should present data-information.”1
Elegant solutions can show rich data. Rich means show the depth or complexity of the data and insights. “The data is nearly always multivariate.” 2
1. Tufte, Edward (1983), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Cheshire, Connecticut: Graphics Press, p. 92, 93 (respectively)
2. elegant. Dictionary.com. Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary. MICRA, Inc. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/elegant (accessed: September 15, 2008)