Data-Driven Guides: Supporting Expressive Design for Information Graphics

In recent years, there is a growing need for communicating complex data in an accessible graphical form. Existing visualization creation tools support automatic visual encoding, but lack flexibility for creating custom design; on the other hand, freeform illustration tools require manual visual encoding, making the design process time-consuming and error-prone. In this paper, we present Data-Driven Guides (DDG), a technique for designing expressive information graphics in a graphic design environment. Instead of being confined by predefined templates or marks, designers can generate guides from data and use the guides to draw, place and measure custom shapes. We provide guides to encode data using three fundamental visual encoding channels: length, area, and position. Users can combine more than one guide to construct complex visual structures and map these structures to data. When underlying data is changed, we use a deformation technique to transform custom shapes using the guides as the backbone of the shapes. Our evaluation shows that data-driven guides allow users to create expressive and more accurate custom data-driven graphics.

1 Introduction

With the increased quantity and improved accessibility of data, people from a variety of backgrounds, including journalist, bloggers, and designers, seek to effectively communicate messages found from complex data in an accessible graphical form. Unlike traditional visualizations (e.g. bar charts or scatterplots) that focus on data exploration and analysis, communicative visualizations put more emphasis on presentation [31]. Commonly referred to as infographics, these visualizations are often embellished with unique representations to convey a story or specific message. When creating such custom information graphics, designers must consider various factors including not only perceptual effectiveness, but also aesthetics, memorability, and engagement [37], [7], [17]. While embellishments in visualization design have traditionally been considered harmful, thoughtfully crafted custom visualizations can be highly engaging and get the messages across more effectively.