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The Art of Insight : How Great Visualization Designers Think
How Great Visualization Designers Think is a book about making design decisions in difficult situations. Decision-making is an essential skill for designers because anyone can create a data visualization with just a few clicks . Data is easily available online, and multiple free and easy-to-use software tools have appeared in the past few years. These developments have led to an explosion in the amount and variety of graphs, charts, and maps; we see them see everywhere, from news publications to social media. We believe this is a positive phenomenon, but only if the creators of those visualizations are able to think clearly and ethically about what they are doing. As the famous line from the 2002 Spider-Man movie says, with great power comes great responsibilityVIsualization books often focus on rules for creating charts and maps, but rarely explain the origin of those rules. Readers are told to start all graphs at a zero baseline, never use pie charts, maximize the data-ink ratio, and so on. We believe that this approach is it shoehorns designers into a single rigid mode of thinking, based only on the perspective of the book's author or authors.Cairo and Flowers' approach in How Great Visualization Designers Think is different. We want to help every reader develop their own thinking and decision-making framework . First, they explore the questions a designer should ask when creating a visualization. Designers should know what they are visualizing and why that dataset needs to be visualized. Designers should also think about how to most effectively convey information based on who might be reading their graphics. Second, they illustrate how great visualization designers answer these questions by analyzing visualizations from designers all around the world. Our sample of cases and designers is the most diverse ever in any visualization book, drawing visualizations not only from the English-speaking world, but also from countries such as China, Korea, India, Egypt or Ukraine, and from designers with a wide diversity of backgrounds. These case analyses will reveal how individuals with great influence in the field and/or a substantial body of work what decisions they had to make and how they justify those decisions, how they shaped their data and visuals, how they styled their graphics, and how they structured their data narratives. You can see examples of case analyses at the end of this proposal.We humans learn by copying and doing. We expect readers of How Great Visualization Designers Think to borrow ideas from these designers, be inspired by them, and apply what they learned from the book to their own work.Cairo and Flowers want our readers to understand that their decisions should be based on clear thinking and reasoning based on facts--we'll describe empirical research, heuristics, and historical conventions, that can help any designer make better decisions. We also want our readers to understand that sometimes the rules of visualization can and should be broken.
272 pages, Kindle Edition
Published May 4, 2022
11 people are currently reading
146 people want to read
About the author
Alberto Cairo
13 books124 followersAlberto Cairo is the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. The author of several textbooks, he consults with companies and institutions like Google and the Congressional Budget Office on visualizations. He lives in Miami, Florida.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 6, 2023
Although Cairo has eloquently described and exemplified the functionalist method in his previous books, he has always been careful not to dogmatize it and criminalize other ways of approaching visualization, always appreciating that things like beauty, humor, and experimentation also are valuable – even functional. Despite being influenced by statistics-minded systematizers such as Edward Tufte, he has acknowledged that the Tufte-inspired prescriptivist/idealist discourse focusing on efficiency can lead to a limited, rule-based, exclusivist understanding of visualization. So it comes as no surprise that in The Art of Insight he presents an even more pragmatist and descriptivist/pluralist perspective, exploring the personal stories, goals, and opinions of a diverse selection of visualization creators coming from (or traveling into) different fields such as data art, data science, or data journalism.
I may be one of the representatives of a technical, analytical minimalism in this book but I’m very glad to be among these amazing, passionate people – categorized as Pragmatists, Eccentrics, Ambassadors, and Narrators – with different perspectives and styles. The Art of Insight is not only a showcase for the diversity of what visualization can be and do, but also a joyful demonstration of how much we share in common in our stories, struggles, motivations, hopes, or doubts, even when the purposes and the end-products of our work are different.
I may be one of the representatives of a technical, analytical minimalism in this book but I’m very glad to be among these amazing, passionate people – categorized as Pragmatists, Eccentrics, Ambassadors, and Narrators – with different perspectives and styles. The Art of Insight is not only a showcase for the diversity of what visualization can be and do, but also a joyful demonstration of how much we share in common in our stories, struggles, motivations, hopes, or doubts, even when the purposes and the end-products of our work are different.
February 7, 2024
Well, mixed feelings. I am a fan of Alberto Cairo, and every book he writes, I go and buy it almost immediately. I was waiting for this one. I mean, when I saw it on Goodreads, I was like checking every 2-3 months to see how close its release was and when I could buy it.
Looking at his books, they have a, I would say, downward trend for me, in the sense that the first one had a great impact on me, the second one a little less, the third one even less. That one made sense as it had to do with a very specific issue. Makes sense as it is very specific even from the title: "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information". For the fourth one, which would have been quite personal to his professional tastes, I had somewhat lover expectations, which I would say were confirmed plus even lower.
Why is that? That happens because the author allows his political preferences to “leak”, a lot, to the point that he even puts the reader who generally agrees with him in defence. That is like to think while reading: where does the interview begin, where does the author throw in a political comment, and where do we have an opinion or propaganda? This makes the reading very, very difficult. And I can't hide a disappointment that filled me while I was reading it.
One example, “immigration”. Well, I am a first generation immigrant, married to also a first generation immigrant, I see the positives of immigration... but somehow Alberto Cairo managed to break my b411s. Like, "Alberto immigration is good, we got it, thank you”. Additionally, where are the negative aspects? Why didn't you interview or reach out to someone with the opposite opinion? Where is your impartiality, let me open the window? Ah, there in that bin, just checking.
And that is of the feelings that I had from reading this book. I got all I wanted from it: books to buy recommended here, people to follow. I learned and saw a lot of things, which will certainly help me in the projects I will do. The overall feeling is very positive. But the negative aspect which becomes more and more present in every book he writes, dropping in his political views tires the reader as they need to be on the defence, making him (OK, me) kind of question the ethics of the author. Based on this, I will continue to buy and read his books, but I think our author-reader relationship has corroded.
Looking at his books, they have a, I would say, downward trend for me, in the sense that the first one had a great impact on me, the second one a little less, the third one even less. That one made sense as it had to do with a very specific issue. Makes sense as it is very specific even from the title: "How Charts Lie: Getting Smarter about Visual Information". For the fourth one, which would have been quite personal to his professional tastes, I had somewhat lover expectations, which I would say were confirmed plus even lower.
Why is that? That happens because the author allows his political preferences to “leak”, a lot, to the point that he even puts the reader who generally agrees with him in defence. That is like to think while reading: where does the interview begin, where does the author throw in a political comment, and where do we have an opinion or propaganda? This makes the reading very, very difficult. And I can't hide a disappointment that filled me while I was reading it.
One example, “immigration”. Well, I am a first generation immigrant, married to also a first generation immigrant, I see the positives of immigration... but somehow Alberto Cairo managed to break my b411s. Like, "Alberto immigration is good, we got it, thank you”. Additionally, where are the negative aspects? Why didn't you interview or reach out to someone with the opposite opinion? Where is your impartiality, let me open the window? Ah, there in that bin, just checking.
And that is of the feelings that I had from reading this book. I got all I wanted from it: books to buy recommended here, people to follow. I learned and saw a lot of things, which will certainly help me in the projects I will do. The overall feeling is very positive. But the negative aspect which becomes more and more present in every book he writes, dropping in his political views tires the reader as they need to be on the defence, making him (OK, me) kind of question the ethics of the author. Based on this, I will continue to buy and read his books, but I think our author-reader relationship has corroded.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews