"All graphics present data and allow a certain degree of exploration of those same data. Some graphics are almost all presentation, so they allow just a limited amount of exploration; hence we can say they are more infographics than visualization, whereas others are mostly about letting readers play with what is being shown, tilting more to the visualization side of our linear scale. But every infographic and every visualization has a presentation and an exploration component: they present, but they also facilitate the analysis of what they show, to different degrees." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"But if you don’t present your data to readers so they can see it, read it, explore it, and analyze it, why would they trust you?" (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"By giving numbers a proper shape, by visually encoding them, the graphic has saved you time and energy that you would otherwise waste if you had to use a table that was not designed to aid your mind." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Data always vary randomly because the object of our inquiries, nature itself, is also random. We can analyze and predict events in nature with an increasing amount of precision and accuracy, thanks to improvements in our techniques and instruments, but a certain amount of random variation, which gives rise to uncertainty, is inevitable." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Don’t rush to write a headline or an entire story or to design a visualization immediately after you find an interesting pattern, data point, or fact. Stop and think. Look for other sources and for people who can help you escape from tunnel vision and confirmation bias. Explore your information at multiple levels of depth and breadth, looking for extraneous factors that may help explain your findings. Only then can you make a decision about what to say, and how to say it, and about what amount of detail you need to show to be true to the data." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"For too many traditional journalists, infographics are mere ornaments to make the page look lighter and more attractive for audiences who grow more impatient with long-form stories every day. Infographics are treated not as devices that expand the scope of our perception and cognition, but as decoration." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Good visualizations shouldn’t over-simplify information. They need to clarify it. In many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] graphical displays can be either figurative or non-figurative.[…] Other graphics that display abstract phenomena are non-figurative. In these ,there is no mimetic correspondence between what is being represented and its representation. The relationship between those two entities is conventional, no tnatural [...]." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Graphics, charts, and maps aren’t just tools to be seen, but to be read and scrutinized. The first goal of an infographic is not to be beautiful just for the sake of eye appeal, but, above all, to be understandable first, and beautiful after that; or to be beautiful thanks to its exquisite functionality." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] if you want to show change through time, use a time-series chart; if you need to compare, use a bar chart; or to display correlation, use a scatter-plot - because some of these rules make good common sense." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"In information graphics, what you show can be as important as what you hide." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Information consumption can lead to higher knowledge on the part of the audience, if its members are able to perceive the patterns or meaning of data. It is not a passive process; our brains are not hard drives that store stuff uncritically .When people see, read, or listen, they assimilate content by relating it to their memories and experiences." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"It is not possible to be a good communicator if you have not developed a keen interest in almost everything as well as an urge to learn as much as you can about the strangest, most varied, unrelated topics. The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] it’s unrealistic to pretend that we can create a perfect model. But we can certainly come up with a good enough one." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
" [...] the better defined the goals of an artifact, the narrower the variety of forms it can adopt." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"The fact that an information graphic is designed to help us complete certain intellectual tasks is what distinguishes it from fine art." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"The first and main goal of any graphic and visualization is to be a tool for your eyes and brain to perceive what lies beyond their natural reach." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] the form of a technological object must depend on the tasks it should help with. This is one of the most important principles to remember when dealing with infographics and visualizations: The form should be constrained by the functions of your presentation. There may be more than one form a data set can adopt so that readers can perform operations with it and extract meanings, but the data cannot adopt any form. Choosing visual shapes to encode information should not be based on aesthetics and personal tastes alone." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] the human brain is not good at calculating surface sizes. It is much better at comparing a single dimension such as length or height. [...] the brain is also a hopelessly lazy machine." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"The more adequately a model fits whatever it stands for without being needlessly complex, and the easier it is for its intended audience to interpret it correctly, the better it will be." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] the relationship between forms and functions is bidirectional. Form doesn’t always follow function; in many cases, the function follows a form that previously followed another unrelated function." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"The overuse of bubble charts in news media is a good example of how infographics departments can become more worried about how their projects look than with how they work." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"The process of visually exploring data can be summarized in a single sentence: find patterns and trends lurking in the data and then observe the deviations from those patterns. Interesting stories may arise from both the norm - also called the smooth - and the exceptions." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Thinking of graphics as art leads many to put bells and whistles over substance and to confound infographics with mere illustrations." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"This is what functional visualization means: choose graphic forms according to the tasks you wish to enable. The purpose of your graphics should somehow guide your decision of how to shape the information." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"We reach wisdom when we achieve a deep understanding of acquired knowledge, when we not only 'get it', but when new information blends with prior experience so completely that it makes us better at knowing what to do in other situations, even if they are only loosely related to the information from which our original knowledge came. Just as not all the information we absorb leads to knowledge, not all of the knowledge we acquire leads to wisdom." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"What is really important is to remember that no matter how creative and innovative you wish to be in your graphics and visualizations, the first thing you must do, before you put a finger on the computer keyboard, is ask yourself what users are likely to try to do with your tool." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"What you design is never exactly what your audience ends up interpreting, so reducing the chances for misinterpretation becomes crucial." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"[...] without conscious effort, the brain always tries to close the distance between observed phenomena and knowledge or wisdom that can help us survive. This is what cognition means. The role of an information architect is to anticipate this process and generate order before people’s brains try to do it on their own." (Alberto Cairo, "The Functional Art", 2011)
"Uncertainty confuses many people because they have the unreasonable expectation that science and statistics will unearth precise truths, when all they can yield is imperfect estimates that can always be subject to changes and updates." (Alberto Cairo, "How Charts Lie", 2019)
"An infographic is an edited, summarized presentation of data selected by a designer to tell a story. A visualization is a display designed to explore data so every reader will be able to extract his or her own stories" (Alberto Cairo)
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