What is Data Visualisation?

By Chloe Smith

Data Visualisation is the art of showing large amounts of data in a creative way, either through graphs & charts or information graphics, more commonly known as infographics. Information graphics are everywhere and we see them without even realising, from visualising the temperature to breaking down government statistics.

Organisations will do this to make data easier to digest. We would all rather look at a chart than try and understand vast amounts of numbers. Let’s take a minute to imagine and appreciate the poor soul that has to do this for us.

Types of Data Visualisation

There are many types of graphs for visualising data. It’s important that you choose the correct one to showcase the information. Otherwise, it will be just as confusing as the numbers from the raw data.

Graphs like bars charts, pie charts & line graphs are all common ways of showing data – these are the ones we are most likely to have seen.

You can even get software that will produce these sorts of graphs for you. Like this one from ConceptDraw.com

You may be wondering where design comes into all this? Well, Information Graphics or Infographics are very design focused, they take skill & require incredible amounts of patience to get it right.

Infographics are a new way of presenting data about almost anything in an easily digestible format.

Information Graphics can be super simple, or incredibly complex like a Taxonomy Graph. Pretty impressive huh?

Data is beautiful and it’s just another way that design touches our lives every day. Next time you have to explain a tonne of data, consider your audience, and engage them with information design—it will be easier to understand and can make mundane information look incredible.

If you enjoyed this post, we highly recommend you take a look at  “Information Is Beautiful”  it is one of our favourite resources for data visualisation.

We hope you enjoyed learning about data visualisation!