Alberto Cairo Quotes

The purpose of infographics and data visualizations is to enlighten people—not to entertain them, not to sell them products, services, or ideas, but to inform them. It’s as simple—and as complicated—as that.

between the beginning of time and 2003, humanity generated roughly five exabytes of data, whereas we now produce the same volume of bits every two days.

graphics should not simplify messages. They should clarify them, highlight trends, uncover patterns, and reveal realities not visible before.

visualization is not something that happens on a page or on a screen; it happens in the mind

Rationalization is a dialogue with ourselves or with like-minded brains. Reasoning, on the other hand, is an honest and open conversation in which we try to persuade interlocutors who don't necessarily agree with us beforehand with arguments that are as universally valid, coherent, and detailed as possible, while opening ourselves to persuasion.

In a time when society is drowning in tsunamis of misinformation, it is possible to change the world for the better if we repeat the truth often and loud enough.

Sometimes, it is not you who finds good ideas when you are seeking them. Instead, good ideas find you in the most unexpected circumstances.

It is in the combination of words and visuals that the magic of understanding often happens.

The world cannot be understood without numbers. And it cannot be understood with numbers alone.

Any chart, no matter how well designed, will mislead us if we don’t pay attention to it.

The life of a visual communicator should be one of systematic and exciting intellectual chaos.

There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics,

When you can admit that you don’t know, you are more likely to ask the questions that will enable you to learn. —Richard Saul Wurman, from Information Anxiety 2

Alberto Cairo has identified four common features of a good data visualization: It contains reliable information. The design has been chosen so that relevant patterns become noticeable. It is presented in an attractive manner, but appearance should not get in the way of honesty, clarity and depth. When appropriate, it is organized in a way that enables some exploration.

A data visualization should only be beautiful when beauty can promote understanding in some way without undermining it in another. Is beauty sometimes useful? Certainly. Is beauty always useful? Certainly not.

The lesson we learn from Nightingale's experience is that, as painful as it may sound, we humans are barely able to reason on our own or when surrounded by like-minded people. When we try to reason this way, we end up rationalizing because we use arguments as self-reinforcing virtue signals. And the worst news is that the more intelligent we are and the more information we have access to, the more successful our rationalizations are. This is in part because we're more aware of what the members of the groups -- political parties, churches, and others -- that we belong to think, and we try to align with them. On the other hand, if you are exposed to an opinion and don't know where the opinion comes from, you're more likely to think about it on its merits.

Perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality. —Christ Firth, from Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

The complexity of a subject, if crucial for understanding the story, needs to be shown in the visualisation. Thus, in many cases, clarifying a subject requires increasing the amount of information, not reducing it.

This thoroughness in the presentation of information is what distinguishes information from propaganda. Propaganda is information presented in a simplistic manner with the intention of shaping public opinion, highlighting what the propagandist believes strengthens his or her case and omitting what may refute it.

The best antidote to a misguided belief is not just truthful information. Instead, it is doubt and uncertainty, cracks in the edifice of belief through which truthful information can later leak in.

A good chart widens our imagination and enhances our understanding by providing insights from numbers.

Perhaps it's time for this principle of verification to stop being just a journalistic ethical mandate and become instead a civic responsibility -- the responsibility to assess whether what we share publicly looks and sounds right, if only to preserve the quality of our information ecosystems and public discourse. We know intuitively that we ought to use hammers responsibly -- to build, not to destroy. We ought to begin thinking about other technologies such as charts and social media in the same way so instead of being part of the misinformation and disinformation malady that currently ails us, we become part of society's immune system.

Chart design, like writing, is as much a science as it is an art.

In the same way that we shouldn’t automatically believe a chart before reading it carefully, neither should we rush to call a chart a lie before we think about what it was designed for.

Freedom depends upon citizens who are able to make a distinction between what is true and what they want to hear. Authoritarianism arrives not because people say that they want it, but because they lose the ability to distinguish between facts and desires.

Well-designed charts are empowering. They enable conversations. They imbue us with X-ray vision, allowing us to peek through the complexity of large amounts of data. Charts are often the best way to reveal patterns and trends hidden behind the numbers we encounter in our lives.

The more we cherish an idea, the more we’ll love any chart that corroborates it, no matter how simplistic that chart is.

Visual Thinking

Agood chart isn’t an illustration but a visual argument,” declares Alberto Cairo near the beginning of his book How Charts Lie.