Design Principles for Visual Communication

How to identify, instantiate, and evaluate domain-specific design principles
for creating more effective visualizations.

Maneesh Agrawala, Wilmot Li, Floraine Berthouzoz

Communications of the ACM
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext

Vol. 54 No. 4, Pages 60-69
10.1145/1924421.1924439
 [image: [article image]] Credit: Mark Skillicorn

Visual communication via diagrams, sketches, charts, photographs, video, and
animation is fundamental to the process of exploring concepts and
disseminating information. The most-effective visualizations capitalize on
the human facility for processing visual information, thereby improving
comprehension, memory, and inference. Such visualizations help analysts
quickly find patterns lurking within large data sets and help audiences
quickly understand complex ideas.

Over the past two decades a number of
books10<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext#R10>
,15<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext#R15>
,18<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext#R18>
,23<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext#R23>have
collected examples of effective visual displays. One thing is evident
from inspecting them: the best are carefully crafted by skilled human
designers. Yet even with the aid of computers, hand-designing effective
visualizations is time-consuming and requires considerable effort. Moreover,
the rate at which people worldwide generate new data is growing
exponentially year to year. Gantz et
al.5<http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2011/4/106586-design-principles-for-visual-communication/fulltext#R5>estimated
we collectively produced 161 exabytes of new information in 2006,
and the compound growth rate between 2007 and 2011 would be 60% annually. We
are thus expected to produce 1,800 exabytes of information in 2011, 10 times
more than the amount we produced in 2006. Yet acquiring and storing this
data is, by itself, of little value. We must understand it to produce real
value and use it to make decisions.

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