by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
(c) 2015
Back in my first programming job after college, I was dabbling in graphics for some bit of computer code that analyzed genetic data. I read some works by Edward Tufte, an expert from Yale who made academic munch-meat of visualization data for his career. The verbiage was lofty; the images were inspiring; and I could not figure out how to translate the lofty rhetoric and aesthetics into meaningful graphics and meaningful insight.
Twenty years later, enter Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. Cole translated the practicalities of how to handle Microsoft Excel and a dataset into meaningful visualizations. I spend a significant portion of my time at work trying to generate graphics that will mean something to someone somewhere (read for an undisclosed audience), and I would benefit from understanding how visualizations work better.
From Cole, I learned how to translate anything into a bar chart, how to simplify a series of numbers into something that will communicate quickly and effectively, and how never to use a pie chart or a donut chart to clog visual communication. This work fills the gap between more academic works (such as Tufte’s, inspiring but lofty) and the practicalities of doing everyday graphics on a budget.
Most interesting are the resources used in this work. The text references many books and blogs that can be consulted for further insight. (Confession: I have already bought two of these books, checked-out one from the library, and bookmarked eleven blogs.) The literature review has proved to make this book worth it in and of itself.
Simple tricks (like adjusting the alignment of the headers for axes to left or right instead of center) that enhance readability also make this book worth its weight in gold bar-charts. If you have a friend who is an artist and have a budget to pay her well, seek after Tufte’s work for inspiration. But if you want to garner the technical know-how to transform some data points into something meaningful, elegant, and effective, I suggest this work for you.