Book Review
Although it’s divided into 5 parts, to my mind the book splits into 3 sections: - The principles - How to lie with charts - Chart gazetteer
the strongest part of the book, with excellent coverage and useful advice on when to use (or avoid) each chart type. Suda also brings good practical advice on some additions and tweaks that add value to each chart type in certain situations.
The principles
The missing section: what to chart
The overview of principles contains little that will be new to anyone who has done their reading on information design. The influence of Tufte and Few is obvious. That’s no criticism though, the principles are sound and it’s useful to have them collected and summarised. For anyone not familiar with the works of Tufte and others, this offers a clear and accessible introduction...ideal for leaving on your boss’s desk, perhaps? For the rest of us, it offers a nice summary and some new thoughts - for instance on using MD5 hashes to create unique colours programmatically.
One of the relative weaknesses of the book is that it concentrates on how to chart at the expense of what to chart. In his introduction, Suda says “The main purpose of this book is to visualize and design for data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing.” This is an excellent goal, but by deliberately ignoring the data itself, Suda has missed at least 50% of information design as a discipline.
How to lie with charts
The main purpose of this book is to visualize and design for data in such a way that it engages the reader and tells a story rather than just being flashy, cluttered and confusing
Suda offers a good summary of wellestablished tricks like using implicitly 3D bags instead of bars, or fiddling with axes.
He also covers some more subtle cheats, like the difficulty of balancing false negative and false positive errors. Anyone wanting an informed opinion on the debate over breast cancer screening would do well to read that section.
When he talks about “Sins of omission”, for instance, I would expect a discussion of the importance of correcting for inflation when showing the long-term trend of anything to do with money. Charting bare financial data without accounting for the fact that £10 in 1970 bought you more than £10 in 2011 is far more misleading, in my view, than using silly 3D pictures of bags of money or chopping the axis.
1) Get good raw data 2) Treat and analyse it to tell the right story 3) D isplay the story in the most compelling way Suda has deliberately avoided any discussion of this, but the book ends up feeling unbalanced as a result. Nonetheless, this remains one of the better summaries of the toolkit available to information designers in the 21st century. I’ll definitely keep it as a desktop quick reference for whenever I can’t quite find the chart I want to tell my story. CI
Further reading Books Edward Tufte, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” Recently revised and updated, this is an uncompromising classic. Stephen Few, “Show Me the Numbers” Elegant and to the point, with a greater focus on business. David McCandless, “Information is Beautiful” Flirting with the “decoration above insight” end of the dataviz spectrum, but helps you to think beyond charts. Darrell Huff, “How to Lie with Statistics” A classic, but still very relevant. The charts may look prettier now, but the tricks are mostly the same!
Web Edward Tufte: edwardtufte.com Stephen Few: perceptualedge.com David McCandless: informationisbeautiful.net Nathan Yau: flowingdata.com Kaiser Fung: junkcharts.typepad.com
Chart gazetteer Two sections of the book are dedicated to discussing the features and uses of a range of common and not-so-common charts, from line and bar charts to “sound charts” and Chernoff faces. I found this
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customerINSIGHT November 2011
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Good information design starts with robust, interesting data. It’s about releasing the story in the data, not embellishment. In my view there are three stages to producing a good infographic, and Suda only considers the last in detail:
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Stephen Hampshire Client Manager The Leadership Factor If you have any thoughts about this article you can contact Stephen at stephenhampshire@leadershipfactor.com