During your design career, whether it’s print, broadcast or interactive related, you will be called upon to clearly communicate, breakdown and educate your audience using data. From the simplest organization charts to detailed annual reports, you will need to make obvious that which is not always apparent. To follow are 5 highly recommended books that will help you in developing your sense of visualizing data.
“We should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
- Albert Einstein
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The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information should be required reading for professional editors, technical writers, academics, and journalists right down to high school students alike. Especially if any part of your day involves writing, editing or designing documents or displays that contain statistical graphics.
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Envisioning Information
Edward Tufte
Tufte presents a collection of some the best examples of information design ever invented, and some of the worst examples. He goes to great lengths showing the underlying principles that make the best examples stand out. This book will be helpful to any web page designer, UI designer, statisticians, cartographers, scientists, or anyone concerned with presenting dense information in a clear way.
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Visualizing Data: Exploring and Explaining Data with the Processing Environment
Ben Fry
There is a growing community around Processing and a number of truly incredible graphs that have been created with just a few lines of code. Ben Fry’s own work, which ranges from simplistic to very sophisticated, is nothing short of mind-blowing. Yet this book demystifies this and make it all look accessible.
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Visual Thinking: for Design
Colin Ware
Visual Thinking: for Design explains at great length the science that underpins visual design and demonstrates how this knowledge can guide designers. Much like Tufte’s Envisioning Information, I found this book to be useful for visual designers, web designers, and designers of information graphics.
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Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten
Stephen Few
This book is a treasure trove of practical information for the creation of tables and graphs. If you enjoy the Tufte books mentioned above but have found them to be more general and difficult to apply. Few takes those same principles, adds many of his own and shows the nitty gritty of creating useful charts.
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