Wrapping Up
A lot of data people see design as just a way to make your graphics look pretty. That’s certainly part of it, but design is also about making your graphics readable, understandable, and usable. You can help people understand your data better than if they were to look at a default graph. You can clear clutter, highlight important points in your data, or even evoke an emotional response. Data graphics can be entertaining, fun, and informative. Sometimes it’ll just be the former, depending on your goal, but no matter what you try to design—visualization, information graphic, or data art—let the data guide your work.
When you have a big dataset, and you don’t know where to begin, the best place to start is with a question. What do you want to know? Are you looking for seasonal patterns? Relationships between multiple variables? Outliers? Spatial relationships? Then look back to your data to see if you can answer your question. If you don’...
