Recently, a member of the ColorAdd team gave a presentation at a local TEDx conference in Portugal. It is in Portuguese, no English available, but he is demonstrating the system, but also letting people know that there is a series of coloured-pencils that are branded with the corresponding ColorAdd icons. I’ve already ordered a few sets to show-off to friends.

I hope that it becomes easier and easier to use these icons and recognize them on everyday products. As they gain adoption, they could become a de facto standard to represent colours in a non-colourful way.

Checkout ColorAdd.net and start to think about places where you might be using colour to convey meaning and what is potentially “lost in translation”. Their icons could be a solution to your issues.

I will be giving a half day workshop on Tuesday 25th January 2011 on the topic of charts, graphs and visualizing data. The plan is to go into some background about charts and graphs, then roll-up our sleeves and actually create some stuff on paper. The idea is to make loads of bad decisions, figure out what went wrong and slowly iterate. By the end of the day, you should be pretty confident in your ability to spot bad design, but also know how to improve it.

It won’t be a technical course, nor one focused on design. You just need to be able to understand why different charts work in which situations and how to tell the best possible story.

For more information, you can visit http://workshops.fivesimplesteps.com be sure to get your tickets before the Early Bird pricing ends and before VAT goes up!

If you have finished the book Designing with Data and want to begin dabbling in visualizations, I recommend you watch this video for inspiration and a better understanding of the tools you will be using.

http://datajournalism.stanford.edu/

All of the content is released under a creative commons license by Geoff McGhee.

I am excited to get a proper printed copy in my hands, after 9+ months of working on the book in various digital forms, it will be great to see the finished product. There is certainly something to be said for physical objects. Their tactile nature somehow make it more real.

Along with the print run, we should also be making available the various eBook versions.

If you haven’t already pre-ordered your copy of the book, do it today, before it is too late.

It is an excellent reference to see both the bursts of innovation as well as the constant creation and trying of new designs for the last 700 years. In the first part of “Designing with Data”, I cover some of the history, not as far back as this chart, but rather the ground work for our current tool set we use for charts and graphs today.

The timeline is using the Simile Timeline widget. Which makes it very easy for anyone to add these sorts of timelines to their own website.

As you scroll through the timeline you can easily see the slow progression of ideas. From taking census data, to tables, to charts. It goes to show that we are always building on previous work. Having a strong grasp and understanding of the basics is important to push this field to the next level.

The programme had a short introduction to some very interesting visualizations and great examples of designing with data. Then David McCandless, author of Information is Beautiful and Neville Brody discuss.

While I personally find myself agreeing with Neville Brody, I also find myself defending David McCandless. Neville’s flippant comment about “It is very pretty, I would like that on my wall”, goes to the heart of the problem with visualizations and infographics, they are decoration more than they are tools to convey data.

If we look back at history, Florence Nightingale, who died 100 years ago this week, is hailed as an data information pioneer. In my book (see page 191) I go to show that her coxbomb chart wasn’t actually that great. But that’s OK, she was trying something new, testing the limits, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t. So even though much of David McCandless’ work might be dismissed by Neville Brody, you have to applaud David for trying. Had Florence Nightingale not created the polar area charts, it might have been many more years before they were refined. Sure, maybe some of David’s stuff is more artsy than useful, but how do we know unless we get out there and try? There will be plenty of failures before any break throughs!

My book, Designing with Data, doesn’t focus on visualizations, it is more about conveying the right story. As Neville Brody says, “Information is political”. There is a story in every piece of data and we want to tell that story rather than make it into a piece of art. We first need to understand the basic tools of how to tell stories with data, then we can go on and work like David McCandless and try to push the limits.

It is an interesting discussion, which I don’t foresee going away any time soon.

It has been nine months of long hard work to create this PDF. There are loads of charts and graphs, all of which needed special care and attention. The team at Five Simple Steps has truly out-done themselves in the creation of this book. It is a thing of beauty.

I will keep posting updates, useful links and other interesting facts about charts and graphs on this website. Be sure to subscribe to the RSS so you can keep-up with the conversation.

The book weighs in over 220 pages and over 43,000 words and more illustrations than I can count. The book is in 5 parts, hence the 5 in Five Simple Steps, but it is logically broken down into two major sections. The first three parts focus on history, colour and deception, whereas the last two parts focus more on the actual charts and graphs themselves. The pros and cons and ideally which situations work best for each type. It is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is an excellent start and gives a foundation to learn more and helps you ask the right questions.

The book was a joy to write, so I’m sure more about visualizations beyond charts and graphs will continue in the future. If anyone has any questions, wants to chat further, or disagrees with the book contents, I am always available via email to discuss. The best part of being with a small and agile publisher is that we can make better revisions in the future and help drive new chapters, features and potentially other books and authors.

So, without further ado, I give you A Practical Guide to Designing with Data.

In these last few weeks we have been laying out the copy-editted text and finding a few “example here” notes that needed to be illustrated. So I’ve been diligently combing through my files and sending off the missing graphics.

Just for fun, I pulled one of the proof PDF files into Photoshop to make thumbnails of the pages. As you can see, the 60+ pages have an abundance of illustrations. I didn’t realize just how many there were until I saw all the pages next to each other. Not to mention this is just Section 4, there are 5 sections in total, each one with copious amounts of graphics. It would be great if no two pages were identical in this book due to the illustrations!

If I haven’t killed the Five Simple Steps team with my spelling mistakes and grammar edits, all these illustrations might just finish them off!

All the hard work focusing on the graphics really help advance the story as well as improve understanding by slowly building-up examples and walking you through the whole process.

As you can see, I spent some time scribbling notes in the margins for two of the five sections. Only to realize that I needed to send the changes back to Five Simple Steps, so most of this was redone with annotations in the PDF files. All was not lost, because it was good to print them all out and not try to read onscreen.

The release date is set for August 9th, 02010 and as you can see, we’re on right track!

The five, in Five Simple Steps is a great constraint for a writer. It made me consider what was important and what wasn‘t and how the book would flow. Overall, it is broken down into two major parts. The first, second and third sections (the first 15 chapters) lay the ground work. They discuss the history of charts and graphs, some issues with colour and layout, and then issues with being deceived by data and poorly (or deliberatly) designed charts. After that, the last two sections, all ten chapters worth, deal with common and not so common charts and graphs. Each chapter digs into a single chart type and discusses the pros, cons and usage for each. It is the bulk of the book, with plenty of examples and illustrations.

This book is an introduction to those who have to create charts and graphs for a living, but could be doing it better. This isn‘t a foray into infographics and visualizations, partly because they are incredibly difficult to get right. It’s more an art than a science. Plus, to be able to create visualizations, you need a good grasp of the basics. Which is why I wrote this book, and why the Five Simple Steps team had confidence in me to write it, because there aren‘t any good resources about how to get started. There are plenty of excellent books showing off great visualizations, but not helping you go from novice to expert.

I hope everyone will enjoy reading the book as much as I enjoyed writing it. It took a lot of hard work, time and effort to get this book finished. It will never be a complete reference, nor be a silver bullet for your workflow. That is where this blog comes in. It is intended to supplement what is found in the book, give a few pointers, links and potentially other books to help take you to the next steps in learning how to design with data.