Complex Diagrams

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I gave a fun (and useful?) lightning talk at Startupfest Montreal 2016 and Ignite Seattle entitled Guaranteed Successful Design. Here’s the slide deck with notes and video from Ignite Seattle. I hope you find it useful and/or entertaining.

There’s a newer, 40-mintue version of the talk that I delivered at the O’Reilly Design Conference 2017. Here’s the longer deck.

The Ignite version (5 minutes):

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A friend asked me what I thought about the NYT Mapping Migration visualization.

It’s interesting that they note this is a new (experimental) kind of visualization; frankly I think it doesn’t work very well.

To review, you (well, I) do visualization like this (one tweet version; hours long version).

In this case, it feels more like they had a structure they wanted to use (well, two structures, treemap and geographic map, they wanted to mash up and use). So that’s a fundamental design failure because structure drives meaning so strongly, you really ought to pick structure in response to your purpose, not structure first. But this seems structure-driven, not purpose-driven.

If I were to communicate this same information I’d say the purpose is to show the relative proportions of origins of each state’s population. Now a geographic map is a bad way to talk about population in general, because geographic size has nothing to do with population (NJ has about 10x the population and 1,000x the population density of Alaska), and so you get all kinds of accidental distortion. However, geographic maps are really good at showing things like regional trends, so there may be some value there.

So how to show proportion per state and also maintain regional relevance? For proportion a classic tree map (subdivided rectangular area, not Voronoi), or even pie graph, per state could work; they almost got that right. Instead of using the geographical shape of each state, each state could be represented with a size proportional to its population with a cartogram, similar to how the electoral vote results maps work.

The result would be the largest square for California, smaller squares for other states. Each state square would be subdivided into regional areas, each area proportional to population origin and colored as they have them here. If it was me, I’d use consistent placement for the colors, yellow/west always on the left, red/east always on the right, etc.

If you wanted to do something other than a tree map, bar graphs (either stacked or side by side) per state would work perfectly well too, but that’s a little harder to implement and keep the geographical relevance.

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I just tweeted this:
Step 5: What graph do I use?
4: What data matters?
3: What Q’s need answering?
2: What actions do I need to inform?
1: What do I care about?

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I wrote a blog post on avoiding visualization errors over at Information Week.

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I drew a timeline of the film Looper for Wired. It’s made of spoilers.

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I’ve been running the Seattle visualization meetup since late 2012. We’ve got a Google Group for jobs and announcements and a Meetup group for events. Please join both!

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Please enjoy content based on my Four Pillars of Visualization design principles. I hope you find it useful. The best way to reach me to provide errata and feedback is on twitter.

The Four Pillars are:

1. Purpose (the why)
2. Content (the what)
3. Structure (the how)
4. Formatting (everything else)

Here are the resources. I’ll update this page as new material comes online. Everything is free.

• A five-part webcast series on good visualization design, based on the Four Pillars, and PDFs of the slide decks: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Concise blog posts discussing the Four Pillars. The depth here is roughly equivalent to what I cover in the standard Four Pillars lecture (as seen above).
  0. Overview
  1. Purpose
  2. Content
• Longer whitepapers that go more in-depth on how to make good design choices.
  3. Descriptions of various structures and suggestions for selecting the right one.
  4. A deep dive into selecting good formatting using my properties table.
• A slide deck from spring 2016 covering the process, which works for a lot of styles of communication, not just visualization.
  
  4 pillars of visualization & communication by Noah Iliinsky from iliinsky

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Because I mention it all the time, here’s Cole Nussbaumer‘s template for good Excel graphs, where she’s fixed all of the bad Excel defaults.

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Updated update: I’m no longer with IBM, and have taken a job in Settle with AWS.

Hello dear readers,

Just a quick note here to mention my new FT gig; I’m now working as a Visualization Expert at IBM’s Center for Advanced Visualization. Part of my role involves continuing to speak at conferences and events as I have been, and various other writing projects. Additionally, I’ll be working on a book for IBM (details TBD), writing some visualization white papers, blog posts, and other materials related to IBM’s visualization projects, and working with the fantastic teams who are devloping IBM’s public visualization tool Many Eyes and their new (unreleased) visualization engine RAVE.

I’m delighted by this new role. As I’ve been ramping up at IBM I haven’t been publishing as much externally, but will be posting links to my writing and presentations here and on twitter (@noahi) as they become available.

Best, Noah

UPDATE: Yes, I’m staying in Seattle.

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Here are some visualization process notes from my talks and tutorials.

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