Artistic Fonts and Pretty Colors

Minard's graph: West to East and back again-
Napoleon's Grand Army shrunk to almost nothing

Human beings have great difficulty understanding mass amounts of data:

Humans are fundamentally different from computers—we're wired to comprehend shapes, patterns and colors. So technology companies are using data visualization to help companies turn large sets of data into pictures that lead people intuitively to the information that is most important to them.

A friend of mine teaches a course on Edward Tufte's Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He leads with Charles Minard's brilliant 1869 rendering of Napoleon's disastrous foray into Russia. The classic graph is renowned for its ability to communicate changes in disparate variables (time, population, location, temperature) in a quickly understood visual form.

Contrast Minard's presentation with the product of newbie analysts, who graph every data set without much consideration for the ultimate point that they are trying to get across. Just as typing one's stream-of-consciousness does not a meaningful essay (or blog post!) make, artistic fonts and pretty colors are no substitute for thought. © 2013 Stephen Yuen