Course Outline

The instructor will show good, bad and ugly visualizations and will describe what makes a good data visualization and how some plots deceive – sometimes intentionally! There will be a fast historical tour taking in pivotal plots from, among others, Florence Nightingale, William Playfair, John W. Tukey and, of course, Edward Tufte. After this, participants will learn about human vision and how we can exploit our biology to efficiently process charts. We will then take a deep dive into human colour perception to discuss issues around colour vision deficiencies and how we can reach a wider audience through a careful choice of colours. The instructor will continue exploring this theme of human visual perception by reviewing the concept of pre-attentive attributes and the Gesthalt principles and how these can be employed in our charts. We will pay particular attention to line charts, pie charts and why 3D effects should only be used with caution. Next, we will review typefaces (fonts), tables and file formats before we move to a practical session where participants will be asked to choose a plot, identify any shortcomings, and then perform a data viz do-over based on the principles learnt during the day.