Do you find yourself needing to communicating with qualitative data? This post discusses three best practices when communicating with qualitative data—effectively using color, reducing text and considering if audience needs quantitative context—and illustrates through example.

I spend a lot of time in my workshops and in my new book discussing preattentive attributes. These are elements like size, color, and position on page that, when used sparingly, can direct your audience's attention to where you want them to pay it when communicating with data. There is a test I like to employ when it comes to determining whether preattentive attributes are being used effectively: the "where are your eyes drawn?" test. In this post, I discuss this test, how to do it, and we look at a number of images using it and discussing the implications for data visualization.

There is a recommendation I find myself often voicing to workshop participants: Think about what you want your audience to be able to easily compare. Put those things as physically close together as you can and align them along a common baseline. This post features a makeover applying this recommendation.