pixels are free
Very early in my career, I was a front-end developer, working in a department with software engineers and video editors. The department director, Jim, was many things—a fantastic mentor, a fierce advocate, a voice of reason—but his background didn’t include software coding or video production. Before stepping into a leadership role, he had been a draftsman, leveraging his degree and decades of expertise in mechanical drawing to create technical visualizations.
I was born in the absolute middle of Generation X, I had never known a business environment where visuals weren’t created with software. Jim was 20 years my senior, and so his experience was the exact opposite. He chose his educational and career path because specialized techniques and training were necessary if one wanted to create illustrations, diagrams, or data visualizations professionally.
Draftsmen like Jim were expected to create with exacting precision. Every picture had to be hand-drawn; every graph, meticulously plotted line by line, point by point. As such, there wasn’t much time for ideation or iteration, and the opportunity cost of every visual created was through the roof. Most of the visuals he created, as Jim recalled, were dense, standardized, and unadorned.
Now that visualizing data has become my own career path, I’m incredibly thankful that we have tools to help us create graphs quickly and easily. We can try different chart types, or experiment with sizing, aesthetics, or the amount of data we include. Given a particular audience or message, we can customize our graphs to suit their needs or preferences. We can split dense charts into multiple views, or build them visually step by step, if that better aids our audience’s understanding.
For Jim and his contemporaries, this kind of iterative process would have been cost-prohibitive, in both time and materials. Fortunately for us, software is fast and pixels are free.
With fewer limitations on our available space, and considering how easy it is to use our tools to quickly create multiple visuals, we should never find ourselves creating a one-size-fits-all graph that tries to do everything. The goal, in a business setting, is to maximize understanding, which is more often achieved when information is presented in individual, bite-size pieces. Accomplishing this is easier with multiple charts, showing one aspect of your analysis at a time, rather than trying to do everything all at once.
Take advantage of the fact that pixels are free. Let yourself explore the wide range of possibilities in visual communication that our tools allow. Jim would be so jealous.
Moving away from dense, complex charts is just one aspect of effective storytelling that we’ll be talking about on June 20th at 11am ET, in a live, interactive mini-workshop, “explore and explain.” Data storyteller and two-time Tableau Visionary Mike Cisneros (that’s me!) will take you on a guided journey through the full process of turning an exploratory analysis into a concise and easy to understand presentation that both explains the critical insights you’ve discovered, and motivates your audience to take action. Visit storytellingwithdata.com/exploreexplain to register.
