Mike’s Tip List
I was asked to come up with a list of data presentation tips for scientists; here’s the result. Distilling one’s philosophy down to bullet points is an exercise I recommend. Not much of the following will be news to regular readers of this site, I suspect, but feel free to pass it on. Or draw up your own, and send me the link.
- Sketch out ideas on paper first, before you turn on the computer. All graphics used to be drawn by hand. Software reduces creativity; good graphics are created despite your software.
- People will look at your pictures before they read your text, if they read it at all. Graphics have to be self-contained. Put your conclusion right there in the caption.
- The graphic has to tell a story (if it doesn’t, don’t use it) and your job is to keep redesigning it until the story is as clear as possible.
- Show the actual data, as much as you can. People can deal with much greater information density than you think. Your job is to help them see the patterns in the data, but…
- Show as little non-data stuff as you can. Remove boxes, lines, colored backgrounds, grids, shadows, and other decoration, except where it’s essential to understanding the data. If you can’t remove it, fade it out or make it smaller, thinner, or dotted.
- Minimize the number of steps required to interpret your graphic. Don’t put required information in the text that could go in the caption, or in the caption if it could go in a key, or in a key if you could just label the points or lines directly.
- Avoid color; it disappears on photocopying or printing. Use contrasting thicknesses, tints, line styles or shapes first, then color. Your graphic must work in black and white.
- If you use color, use an intuitive scale that relates sensibly to your data, not all the colors of the rainbow. Make sure colors vary in intensity, not just hue, and remember some of your readers will be color-blind.
- Provide context. Always use a scale and give sources. Six small, related graphs juxtaposed in the space we’d usually use for just one provide more than six times as much content.
- Learn some basic typography, Illustrator, and Photoshop. It’s not hard to find tutorials, and they’re wonderful transferable skills.
- Never print out your slides. Give people a handout with your contact details, a couple of graphics or tables (including any too detailed for a PowerPoint slide), your conclusions, and a bibliography.
- Don’t make lists of bullet points, like this one. Show, not tell.
Manifestos are great for removing nuance and blurring away contention, aren’t they? That’s why they’re so satisfying to write.
Comments
Structure the information so that the most important element(s) pop out to the top. Think about the data consumers' questions given the data (and the point you want to get across) and structure/sort/highlight the information so that it is the first thing processed when the graph or table is created. Elimination of extra ink is part of this. If you need to use pre-attentives you can put them in, but using structure is more subtle with the same ends.
Posted by: Chris | March 5, 2007 5:08 PM
Excellent point. Alphabetically-ordered tables are a pet peeve of mine. There's almost always a better way.
Posted by: Mike | March 5, 2007 11:01 PM
I would strongly argue for colored graphical presentation: (1) colored graphs are more readable, (2) most graphs are nowadays presented on screen only, and (3) nature did not aim colors at bees and birds only. Besides, there are more people not trained adequately to perceive graphs than color-blind people. What is wrong (or at least non-aesthetic) with the bulk of color charts today is that colors used (i.e. default software colors used by most people) are too ‘heavy’, almost abusive.
Also, grids are important for those who really read graphs. Just do not present them with the same intensity as data (symbols, curves, bars).
I would appreciate your comments on my graphs at Weekly (http://www.grabovrat.com/weekly/grWeeklyCurrent.html, not every week but there are quite a few of them) and Handbook (http://www.grabovrat.com/grHandbookContents.html ). I hope that my graphs are not bad despite the software used.
Kresimir
Posted by: Kresimir J. Adamic | March 10, 2007 8:37 PM
I really don't think it's true that most graphs are only ever presented on screen. We'll be printing stuff on paper for a while, and our publishers can't always afford to use color. Even if they can, until everyone's using color printers and color photocopiers, we'll have to make graphics that work equally well when transformed into black and white. And if they work equally well, then the color was superfluous, so why use it?
I agree color can be enormously useful if you use it properly, but most software doesn't and most people don't. Too often I find people are indicating differences with color alone, which actually can make the graph less readable than if another method was used. I find getting people to design in black and white actually gets them thinking more creatively about data display, rather than falling back on the same default choices.
Posted by: Mike | March 11, 2007 12:27 PM
Mike,
This is an excellent set of guidelines for scientists and anyone else who needs to present quantitative information. One minor departure from your tips that I'd like to mention is that, although just printing PowerPoint slides is rarely useful, if you use the notes section of PowerPoint to provide a written commentary, recording what you said verbally when presenting the slides, a printed version of the slides and notes together can serve as a useful document to give people after the presentation.
Take care,
Steve
Posted by: Stephen Few | March 14, 2007 7:10 PM
Wow thanks for this list -->printed and hanging in my cube.
Posted by: edmDusty | May 4, 2007 10:29 PM