Designing Data Visualizations: Telling Stories With Data

This is a talk aimed at people who know their data, and want to learn how to visualize it most effectively. If you have data, a need for answers, and a blank page, this is a great place to start.

We’ll start briefly addressing the value of visualization, and discuss the differences between visualization for analysis and presentation.

From there we’ll figure out what story to tell with your visualization by examining the holy visualization trinity: - your goals - your customer’s needs - the shape of your data

Once the story has been selected, we need to construct it. We’ll discuss key considerations to make good choices about: - selecting appropriate data - selecting appropriate axes - visually encoding the data

We’ll end with a brief discussion of some current tools, and look at some classic and innovative visualization examples.