use color to focus or to compete for attention
Getting your audience’s attention and focusing it well are critical components of building a successful data communication. While there are several ways to capture attention, the two techniques we find most effective—and the ones we talk about the most—are:
employ words more thoughtfully, and more liberally, in support of our graphs; and
apply color more sparingly but intentionally to make the important elements of your visual stand out.
However, the context in which our messages are presented dramatically influences the amount of attention we need to compete for. As you can imagine, there’s a huge difference between presenting a detailed slide deck to a small, engaged group and sharing visuals on social media in the hopes of capturing the fleeting attention of millions. We can use words and color to focus attention in both scenarios, but our tactics and our goals will vary tremendously.
As a case study, let’s use a recent investigation on the Rolling Stone “500 Greatest Albums of All Time” list, Chris Dalla Riva, a musician who does a great deal of data-oriented writing about music, co-authored a piece with Matt Daniels of the Pudding about the differences between the version of the list from 2003 vs. the version compiled in 2020. The whole piece is worth a look for any music fan, but one facet of the analysis I found interesting was the composition of the voter pool for the different lists.
Working on the assumption that the music we all have the strongest affinity for is “whatever was popular in our teen years,” Dalla Riva and Daniels could have created a simple paired bar chart to show how the “teen years” have shifted between the two voting cohorts.
A simple paired bar chart like this could have communicated how 2003 voters’ teenage years were mostly in the 1980s or earlier, while more than half of the 2020 judges’ teenage years were in the 1990s or later.
While this would have been an accurate accounting of the data (the 2020 list has much younger voters in it, while the 2003 list was created mostly by Boomers and Gen Xers), and it might have worked in a business PowerPoint, it wouldn’t have moved the needle very much in terms of social media engagement.
Even in a business setting, I might have suggested that a paired bar chart could be improved upon. Another option would be to use a simple diverging bar chart, sorted by the decade of each voter’s teenage experience, to show one potential cause of the lists’ differences.
With words and color now doing a bit of work here, the diverging bar chart represents the story slightly more effectively. Look how we’re using data labels selectively, putting our annotations on the page and close to the data, and keeping our colors uniform across text, legend, and chart. It’s an improvement, but it’s got a ways to go to be a “scroll-stopping” image.
Accounting for this chart being part of a larger story (one that delves more deeply into the albums on each list, not just the judges behind the decisions), and that story utilizing a dramatic “dark mode” color palette, another option could have been to keep that diverging bar chart, but with a fresh coat of neon paint:
Now we’re talking. With a less common but still highly contrasting color palette, a dramatic dark background, some fading out of less-important data points, and the addition of context (the total judges for each list), this is beginning to feel like a visual that could be the accompanying image for the full article…or could it?
Considering how “creative” we often get in our day-to-day PowerPoints, the above version of the chart feels good. In the context of the office, it’s likely all you’ll need. Dalla Riva and Daniels, however, know that they have an astoundingly more difficult task that we often do in terms of competing for their audience’s attention.
Instead of getting to a simple diverging bar chart and calling it a day, they crafted something far more memorable, engaging, and useful. In a choice that aesthetically and thematically carried through all of the visuals in their story, they used thumbnail images of the voters themselves to build the bars—a choice that made the design more distinctive, compelling, and conducive to both granular exploration and high-level summary assessment.
This screenshot of Dalla Riva and Daniels’s actual design, using thumbnails of judges’ portraits to denote when their individual teenage years were, barely does it justice.
Moreover, those thumbnail photos animate as you scroll through the story, dimming and flying to different visual configurations as the voter cadres are depicted by actual age, gender, and other meaningful cohort differences. I strongly encourage folks to explore the interactive themselves to get the full experience.
It’s undeniably fun to explore and experiment with color and design. Usually, for business communications, they’re best deployed to bring people to that most granular level of focus and understanding. In a different context, though, where your audience has a much lower level of initial engagement, you may find yourself needing to use the power of color very differently, just to break through the noise and get your communication noticed at all.
