"A chart that knows its context well will naturally end up looking better because it’s showing what it needs to show and nothing else. Good context begets good design. Good charts are only the means to a more profound end: presenting your ideas effectively. Good charts are not the product you’re after. They’re the way to deliver your product - insight." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"A perfectly relevant visualization that breaks a few presentation rules is far more valuable - it’s better - than a perfectly executed, beautiful chart that contains the wrong data, communicates the wrong message, or fails to engage its audience." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"[…] although the relationship between perception and correlation is linear for all types of charts, the linear rate varies between chart types." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Bad complexity neither elucidates important salient points nor shows coherent broader trends. It will obfuscate, frustrate, tax the mind, and ultimately convey trendlessness and confusion to the viewer. Good complexity, in contrast, emerges from visualizations that use more data than humans can reasonably process to form a few salient points." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"But rules are open to interpretation and sometimes arbitrary or even counterproductive when it comes to producing good visualizations. They’re for responding to context, not setting it. Instead of worrying about whether a chart is "right" or "wrong", focus on whether it’s good." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Charts used to confirm are less formal, and designed well enough to be interpreted, but they don’t always have to be presentation worthy. […] Or maybe you don’t know what you’re looking for […] This is exploratory work - rougher still in design, usually iterative, sometimes interactive. Most of us don’t do as much exploratory work as we do declarative and confirmatory; we should do more. It’s a kind of data brainstorming." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Confirmation is a kind of focused exploration, whereas true exploration is more open-ended. The bigger and more complex the data, and the less you know going in, the more exploratory the work. If confirmation is hiking a new trail, exploration is blazing one." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Dataviz has become a competitive imperative for companies. Those that don’t have a critical mass of managers capable of thinking visually will lag behind the ones that do." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Good design isn’t just choosing colors and fonts or coming up with an aesthetic for charts. That’s styling - part of design, but by no means the most important part. Rather, people with design talent develop and execute systems for effective visual communication. They understand how to create and edit visuals to focus an audience and distill ideas." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Good design serves a more important function than simply pleasing you: It helps you access ideas. It improves your comprehension and makes the ideas more persuasive. Good design makes lesser charts good and good charts transcendent." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"In general, charts that contain enough data to take minutes, not seconds, to digest will work better on paper or a personal screen, for an individual who’s not being asked to listen to a presentation while trying to take in so much information." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Keep in mind that bars, lines, and scatter plots are your workhorses. Those three forms alone will help you arrive at many good charts in most situations. While you shouldn’t shun other forms, you also don’t need to choose different ones just to be different." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"People feel data. They don’t just process statistics and come to rational conclusions. They form emotions about the data visualization. We are not informed by charts; we’re affected by them." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Sketching bridges idea and visualization. Good sketches are quick, simple, and messy. Don’t think too much about real values or scales or any refining details. In fact, don’t think too much. Just keep in mind those keywords, the possible forms they suggest, and that overarching idea you keep coming back to, the one you wrote down in answer to What am I trying to say (or learn)? And draw. Create shapes, develop a sense of what you want your audience to see. Try anything." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"To build fluency in this new language, to tap into this vehicle for professional growth, and to give your organization a competitive edge, you first need to recognize a good chart when you see one." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Unlike text, visual communication is governed less by an agreed-upon convention between 'writer' and 'reader' than by how our visual systems react to stimuli, often before we’re aware of it. And just as composers use music theory to create music that produces certain predictable effects on an audience, chart makers can use visual perception theory to make more-effective visualizations with similarly predictable effects." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Ultimately, when you create a visualization, that’s what you need to know. Is it good? Is it effective? Are you helping people see an idea and learn from it? Are you making your case?" (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Visualization is an abstraction, a way to reduce complexity […] complexity and color catch the eye; they’re captivating. They can also make it harder to extract meaning from a chart." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"We see first what stands out. Our eyes go right to change and difference - peaks, valleys, intersections, dominant colors, outliers. Many successful charts - often the ones that please us the most and are shared and talked about - exploit this inclination by showing a single salient point so clearly that we feel we understand the chart’s meaning without even trying." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"When deeply complex charts work, we find them effective and beautiful, just as we find a symphony beautiful, which is another marvelously complex arrangement of millions of data points that we experience as a coherent whole." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Without context, no one […] can say whether that chart is good. In the absence of context, a chart is neither good nor bad. It’s only well built or poorly built. To judge a chart’s value, you need to know more - much more - than whether you used the right chart type, picked good colors, or labeled axes correctly. Those things can help make charts good, but in the absence of context they’re academic considerations. It’s far more important to know Who will see this? What do they want? What do they need? What idea do I want to convey? What could I show? What should I show? Then, after all that, How will I show it?" (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
"Your eyes and your brain always notice more dynamic visual information first and fastest. The implicit lesson is to make the idea you want people to see stand out. Conversely, make sure you’re not helping people see something that either doesn’t help convey your idea or actively fights against it." (Scott Berinato, "Good Charts : the HBR guide to making smarter, more persuasive data visualizations", 2023)
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