Sami Ben Gharbia passed along a good link on Twitter about how you can never have too many graphics in your data representations. The CNN article focuses on government and organizational data, which, to date, has been considered highly useful, but pretty boring. Where is this trend going?
“A booming interest in data visualization, which can transform boring stats into compelling graphical presentations explaining our world.”
This concept obviously translates into any environment, and I couldn’t agree more.
You know how important first impressions are? How wearing your best suit matters in a business meeting? Same goes for your content. The more visually appealing, the more digestible it is.
This is especially important when you’re offering publicly available data for the masses, whether from a governmental standpoint or a corporate standpoint. With the increased focus on content production, and making large amounts of free content for the masses, if you want to be effective in your overall strategy (often this means to drive readers back to your brand in some way), you’ve got to make that content accessible in more ways than just words.
“Pretty” graphics indicate the following (at least to me):
- You’ve spent time on your overall presentation
- You’ve thought about how to most effectively present your data
- You remember that, in many cases, a picture is worth a thousand words - you get one shot at the picture part
- You’ve invested in “buttoning your data up”
- You’ve taken into account your audience, and that some people may not understand your numbers - and therefore your presentation of those numbers - as well as you do
- You care about how well people can interact with, play with and learn more about your data
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- OneRiot API // Data Visualization Challenge (oneriot.com)
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