Plots Tell a Story

A Story of Outliers

A Story of Comparison

Pew Research

A Story Over Time

What is Your Story?

When you are making a plot for other people, keep a few questions in mind:

• What message are you trying to convey?
• What visual elements are you using to convey that message?
• Is there anything you can remove from your plot to keep your message clear?
• Will anything on your plot be a question mark?
• Can people find the numbers behind your visualization?

Interactive Plots for Context

You Can Go Too Far

Some Plots Only Work Online

Special Requirements

Interactive plots are cool, but require much more infrastructure compared to image plots.

• A website to host them
• Knowledge of web design tools such as HTML and CSS
• Sufficient storage and bandwidth to serve the plots to viewers
• Extra precautions to hide sensitive data

A Note on Dashboards

Color Blindness

https://projects.susielu.com/viz-palette

Resolution

Alt Text

Alt Text Example

Plotly

gghighlight

gganimate

flexdashbaord

Maps with Leaflet

RColorBrewer

From Data to Viz

For Next Time