Preattentive processing occurs without our consciousness at an extremely high speed. It is tuned to detect a specific set of visual attributes called Preattentive Attributes. If you want to understand more about how we process a visual, please refer to this post on Visual Perception. Preattentive attributes determine what information catches our attention. This is important in…
It is said that a picture is worth a thousand words. Why is it that we can understand complex information on a visual but not from rows of tabular data? The answer to this lies in understanding visual perception and a little bit about human memory. So grab a cup of your favorite drink and read…
The short answer is NO. With all the magical tools available at our disposal, it is very easy to create awesomely complex looking charts and graphs that add no value. 3D charts are one of them. Edward Tufte called this conventional graphical paraphernalia that does not tell the viewer anything new. Furthermore, they come in…
Bar charts are the most commonly used charts. But did you know that there are different types of bar charts and these can all be created using Excel? What if you could bring more life to your presentation by highlighting aspects that no one saw before? Watch this tutorial to learn how to do this with bar charts.
As the Olympic Games and fervor go on for a few more days, FiveThirtyEight.com published an article early this week, titled “Hosting the Olympics is a Terrible Investment“. The ongoing Rio Olympics had overrun its budget by 50% by the time the Olympic torch was lit at the opening ceremonies. What sort of investment goes into hosting…
Slopegraphs first appeared in Edward Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Slopegraphs compare changes usually over time for a list of nouns located on an ordinal or interval scale – Tufte Creating a Slopegraph in R While there are templates and tools available to create a Slopegraph, creating one in R still takes a…
Bar charts are one of the most commonly used chart types. They are easy to understand and are great for comparisons. But every so often we come across bar charts that are colorful, poorly designed and misleading. In this post, I want to give you 5 easy tips to create functional and beautiful bar charts. I…