When laying out data of any kind it is important to make it easily readable and useful for the users who will be interacting with it. There are some major factors that will determine the outcome of your information graphic and some techniques that can be implemented to reduce noise and clutter in your design. As I have been in design school if I have learned anything it is attention to detail and the use of careful color choices can make to world of difference when it comes to making a successful design. The slightest bit of awkward negative space can totally throw off the balance of your whole composition. Now relatively speaking these subtle changes mostly apply to the fine art areas of graphic design but when making information graphic that is all the same an important aspect of composition and overall effectiveness in your design. Clutter can be caused by unnecessary information, or could be caused by the awkward negative space caused by an object to close to another, or lines that interact with each other in odd ways. Color theory is another important concept at hand that you must carefully consider. Over powering color may misrepresent your information, or actually take away form the date itself. You have to be careful also to choose a color scheme that will allow the non-artist to understand your table of chart. For example if your information is scaled according to overlapping colors and tonal recognition as the indicator of a numeric value your information graphic will lose interest and legibility to people who may not understand.
Two of the graphics that really drew my attention in this article where: the one about the Chinese poets, as well as the world river and mountain chart. These stood out to me as super effective charts. In the case of the Chinese poetry info graphic I think that the representation of numbers was simply and effectively done in this graph. Circles of various sizes represent smaller and larger concentrations of poets form that part of China. The color scheme is simple as well the map allowing the viewer to easily navigate the graphic and ignore noise. The river chart I find to be completely the most interesting chart in the article that we just read. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I have lived on the Mississippi river for the majority of my life but the simple layout of rivers from the top of the page down is very effective and interesting. This chart however suffers from a great deal of unnecessary noise when dealing with the second half of its presented information. The mountains as stated in the reading do seem a bit to stylized and could benefit from being restructured in a different manner and maybe have a chart of their own. One other graphic that I will mention quickly that I really noticed an improvement on from its first version to its second is the one dealing with the parking officers positions. The subtle change from dark heavy weighted lines surrounding the characters to the grey made the world of difference. They then added a splash a color and changed the typeface and made this information graphic appear 100 time better in my opinion. Things to keep in mind in the future when doing designs of my own.
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