Research Guides: Data Literacy, Datasets, Data Visualization, Data Management: Designing a Visualization

Chart Choosers

If you have collected and processed a data set but need some help with choosing an appropriate visualization type, you might find one of these "chart choosers" helpful.

It's useful to have an idea of what might be interesting about your data first, so that you can select a visualization type that will highlight that part of your data. If you're still exploring your data, you might want to try a broad range of charts and combinations.

Chart Chooser
Choosing a Good Chart
The Data Visualization Catalogue
This site presents a nice graphical summary of visualization types. For choosing a chart, you might want to "Search by Function", which will guide you to possible visualization types according to functions such as showing "Relationships", "Parts to a whole", "Distribution", "Flow", etc. Note that it shows possibilities, not necessarily which visualization types would be most highly recommended.
Graphic Cheat Sheet
A blog post discussing the chart is available at http://billiondollargraphics.blogspot.com.br/2012/07/updated-graphic-cheat-sheet.html (but beware of broken links).

Designing a Data Visualization Project

Fry, B. (2008). Visualizing data. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, Inc.
Seven Stages of Visualizing Data (p. 5): Acquire, Parse, Filter, Mine, Represent, Refine, Interact

more...
Planning and Designing Effective Data Visualizations
Has links to slides and notes from Noah Iliinsky.
How to Be a Data Visualization Star
A video of the slides linked from the "Planning" link above.
Visual Encodings
If you have a general idea of the type of chart you'd like but don't know exactly how to use your data variables to make that chart, this "visual encodings" table might help. For example, it can help you know when to have colors represent values of a variable and when that might not be an appropriate encoding.
Eight Principles of Data Visualization
Graphs on Multiple Slides
The Squint Test

Infographics Design Resources

Infographics are a popular way to tell a story using data, but it's often difficult to get started producing them yourself because they require a combination of storytelling, graphic design, and data visualization skills. There are also many possible tools you can use to produce them, from Adobe Illustrator or InDesign (access for Duke affiliates), to PowerPoint, to various online tools such as Canva or Piktochart. Below are a few resources you might find helpful to get started learning those skills and tools.

How to Design Infographics (Canva blog)
The Canva site has many very helpful posts. This one is a good place to start, but feel free to explore other articles in their Design School by clicking the LEARN link at the top of the page.
Canva tutorials
NCSU Infographics presentation and activity (Google Drive)
This Google Drive folder contains a presentation given by NC State on designing infographics, including a Piktochart activity.
How to Make Powerful Infographics in PowerPoint (YouTube)
I don't particularly connect with Mike Parkinson's personality and style, but he gives a lot of great guidance, such as having a purpose, taking your audience into consideration, only telling a micro-story, sketching, and only rendering once you have the other work done. It's a good start for how to use PowerPoint graphics tools for creating infographics rather than a more expensive, powerful, and less accessible tool such as Adobe Illustrator.
Infographic layout cheat sheet (Piktochart)
Infographic design process (Piktochart)
On designing a custom visualization
On visual design