More than Mere Words

I don’t think of myself as an artistic person (I got a “needs improvement” in first grade art), but a lot of our work is about turning data into actionable information and a lot of times the best way to do that is to make data visual.  For instance, I could show you an enormous table of profitability rates by product or I could show a simple bar chart (see the example at the bottom of this page.)

Clearly the picture is worth a lot more than the 50 words. Intellectually I get it—that pictures often beat words in communicating information, but how do I learn how to think more visually? Since I was educated primarily in words so that’s how I’ve learned to think.  Except for the occasional art class, we aren’t taught to visualize, we are taught to read; we aren’t taught to draw, we are taught to write. To a large degree that‘s because of the technology of the time—keyboards—allows us to communicate with lots of people over lots of different time frames, but always with words.

But the world is changing fast and it is rapidly evolving away from mere words.  We live in a world of 32 bit color, video games, mind maps and interactive visualizations. The world is exploding with technologies that allow us to communicate things with pictures and the possibilities are exciting and endless. So how do I explore them—how do we break the chains of our word based thinking and learn to think and communicate in pictures? By practice and habit. And there are several great sources to encourage new visual habits. A few of my favorites:

Blogs:

Flowing Data, Information Aesthetics

Books:

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data,  Beautiful Evidence, The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures