Visual Storytelling Quotes

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder.

Hiding from your fears does not make you safe it makes you live a life of fear that keeps growing in size, which is worse.

Like other kinds of intelligence, the storyteller's is partly natural, partly trained. It is composed of several qualities, most of which, in normal people, are signs of either immaturity or incivility: wit (a tendency to make irreverent connections); obstinacy and a tendency toward churlishness (a refusal to believe what all sensible people know is true); childishness (an apparent lack of mental focus and serious life purpose, a fondness for daydreaming and telling pointless lies, a lack of proper respect, mischievousness, an unseemly propensity for crying over nothing); a marked tendency toward oral or anal fixation or both (the oral manifested by excessive eating, drinking, smoking, and chattering; the anal by nervous cleanliness and neatness coupled with a weird fascination with dirty jokes); remarkable powers of eidetic recall, or visual memory (a usual feature of early adolescence and mental retardation); a strange admixture of shameless playfulness and embarrassing earnestness, the latter often heightened by irrationally intense feelings for or against religion; patience like a cat's; a criminal streak of cunning; psychological instability; recklessness, impulsiveness, and improvidence; and finally, an inexplicable and incurable addiction to stories, written or oral, bad or good.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

The Starship Enterprise is not a collection of motion picture sets or a model used in visual effects. It is a very real vehicle; one designed for storytelling.

Write visually or die!

When you have just a number or two that you want to communicate: use the numbers directly.

Using a table in a live presentation is rarely a good idea. As your audience reads it, you lose their ears and attention to make your point verbally. When

You should always want your audience to know or do something. If you can't concisely articulate that, you should revisit whether you need to communicate in the first place.

Visuals are processed 60,000 times faster than text by the human brain and 90% of information transmitted to the brain is visual.17 Humans evolved over millennia to respond to visual information long before they developed the ability to read text. Images act like shortcuts to the brain: we are visual creatures, and we are programmed to react to visuals more than to words.

Want to be a great communicator? Try writing a screenplay. Even if your story is more hideous than the films Ishtar and Gigli combined, you’ll learn how to capture and hold attention. That’s because a screenplay forces you to make your point through visual description, action, or dialogue. Abstract or theoretical content is not allowed. The activity forces you to discover and develop visual storytelling.

Will you be encountering each other for the first time through this communication, or do you have an established relationship? Do they already trust you as an expert, or do you need to work to establish credibility? These are important considerations when it comes to determining how to structure your communication and whether and when to use data, and may impact the order and flow of the overall story you aim to tell.

That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience. That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10–15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.

Wild animals enjoying one another and taking pleasure in their world is so immediate and so real, yet this reality is utterly absent from textbooks and academic papers about animals and ecology. There is a truth revealed here, absurd in its simplicity. This insight is not that science is wrong or bad. On the contrary: science, done well, deepens our intimacy with the world. But there is a danger in an exclusively scientific way of thinking. The forest is turned into a diagram; animals become mere mechanisms; nature's workings become clever graphs. Today's conviviality of squirrels seems a refutation of such narrowness. Nature is not a machine. These animals feel. They are alive; they are our cousins, with the shared experience kinship implies. And they appear to enjoy the sun, a phenomenon that occurs nowhere in the curriculum of modern biology. Sadly, modern science is too often unable or unwilling to visualize or feel what others experience. Certainly science's "objective" gambit can be helpful in understanding parts of nature and in freeing us from some cultural preconceptions. Our modern scientific taste for dispassion when analyzing animal behaviour formed in reaction to the Victorian naturalists and their predecessors who saw all nature as an allegory confirming their cultural values. But a gambit is just an opening move, not a coherent vision of the whole game. Science's objectivity sheds some assumptions but takes on others that, dressed up in academic rigor, can produce hubris and callousness about the world. The danger comes when we confuse the limited scope of our scientific methods with the true scope of the world. It may be useful or expedient to describe nature as a flow diagram or an animal as a machine, but such utility should not be confused with a confirmation that our limited assumptions reflect the shape of the world. Not coincidentally, the hubris of narrowly applied science serves the needs of the industrial economy. Machines are bought, sold, and discarded; joyful cousins are not. Two days ago, on Christmas Eve, the U.S. Forest Service opened to commercial logging three hundred thousand acres of old growth in the Tongass National Forest, more than a billion square-meter mandalas. Arrows moved on a flowchart, graphs of quantified timber shifted. Modern forest science integrated seamlessly with global commodity markets—language and values needed no translation. Scientific models and metaphors of machines are helpful but limited. They cannot tell us all that we need to know. What lies beyond the theories we impose on nature? This year I have tried to put down scientific tools and to listen: to come to nature without a hypothesis, without a scheme for data extraction, without a lesson plan to convey answers to students, without machines or probes. I have glimpsed how rich science is but simultaneously how limited in scope and in spirit. It is unfortunate that the practice of listening generally has no place in the formal training of scientists. In this absence science needlessly fails. We are poorer for this, and possibly more hurtful. What Christmas Eve gifts might a listening culture give its forests? What was the insight that brushed past me as the squirrels basked? It was not to turn away from science. My experience of animals is richer for knowing their stories, and science is a powerful way to deepen this understanding. Rather, I realized that all stories are partly wrapped in fiction—the fiction of simplifying assumptions, of cultural myopia and of storytellers' pride. I learned to revel in the stories but not to mistake them for the bright, ineffable nature of the world.

Pictures, even beautifully drawn pictures, that do not properly relate to one another in a narrative sequence do not make good comics.

The world of storytelling was changing dramatically around Enoch. The new visual communication called “cuneiform” was overtaking the traditional oral recitation of verse. Scribes created cuneiform as a codified physical expression of language, using utensils to make impressions on clay tablets. The scribes wanted to keep a tangible account of personal and public wealth that could not be challenged by verbal lies or faulty memory. Using handheld styluses pressed into the clay, they could list objects owned by the ruler and how many he possessed. It had started out as pictographs of cows, gold, wheat, wood, and other belongings. It had evolved into an abstract system of symbols that could be rapidly copied or communicated in a legal dispute.

The Renzettis live in a small house at 84 Chestnut Avenue. Frank Renzetti is forty-four and works as a bookkeeper for a moving company. Mary Renzetti is thirty-five and works part-time at a day care. They have one child, Tommy, who is five. Frank’s widowed mother, Camila, also lives with the family. My question: How likely is it that the Renzettis have a pet? To answer that, most people would zero in on the family’s details. “Renzetti is an Italian name,” someone might think. “So are ‘Frank’ and ‘Camila.’ That may mean Frank grew up with lots of brothers and sisters, but he’s only got one child. He probably wants to have a big family but he can’t afford it. So it would make sense that he compensated a little by getting a pet.” Someone else might think, “People get pets for kids and the Renzettis only have one child, and Tommy isn’t old enough to take care of a pet. So it seems unlikely.” This sort of storytelling can be very compelling, particularly when the available details are much richer than what I’ve provided here. But superforecasters wouldn’t bother with any of that, at least not at first. The first thing they would do is find out what percentage of American households own a pet. Statisticians call that the base rate—how common something is within a broader class. Daniel Kahneman has a much more evocative visual term for it. He calls it the “outside view”—in contrast to the “inside view,” which is the specifics of the particular case. A few minutes with Google tells me about 62% of American households own pets. That’s the outside view here. Starting with the outside view means I will start by estimating that there is a 62% chance the Renzettis have a pet. Then I will turn to the inside view—all those details about the Renzettis—and use them to adjust that initial 62% up or down. It’s natural to be drawn to the inside view. It’s usually concrete and filled with engaging detail we can use to craft a story about what’s going on. The outside view is typically abstract, bare, and doesn’t lend itself so readily to storytelling. So even smart, accomplished people routinely fail to consider the outside view. The Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan once predicted trouble for the Democrats because polls had found that George W. Bush’s approval rating, which had been rock-bottom at the end of his term, had rebounded to 47% four years after leaving office, equal to President Obama’s. Noonan found that astonishing—and deeply meaningful.9 But if she had considered the outside view she would have discovered that presidential approval always rises after a president leaves office. Even Richard Nixon’s number went up. So Bush’s improved standing wasn’t surprising in the least—which strongly suggests the meaning she drew from it was illusory. Superforecasters don’t make that mistake. If Bill Flack were asked whether, in the next twelve months, there would be an armed clash between China and Vietnam over some border dispute, he wouldn’t immediately delve into the particulars of that border dispute and the current state of China-Vietnam relations. He would instead look at how often there have been armed clashes in the past. “Say we get hostile conduct between China and Vietnam every five years,” Bill says. “I’ll use a five-year recurrence model to predict the future.” In any given year, then, the outside view would suggest to Bill there is a 20% chance of a clash. Having established that, Bill would look at the situation today and adjust that number up or down.

It’s the visuals, and that’s the engine inside the methodology. Then you have the natural sound on camera. It’s what your subjects tell you, the cars passing by in the street; in the case of Afghanistan, it’s the helicopters flying over and the guys firing machine guns. And then you’ve got your own narration, which connects the dots and tells you what all of this means.

Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts frequently uses cartoons as part of its visual content mix to tell a fun and irreverent story around people’s cravings for Pop-Tarts.

Often, the cartoons feature people using sneaky and creative ways to coax their Pop-Tart into a toaster. One such example occurred over the July Fourth holiday, where a cartoon depicted a person luring a Pop-Tart into a toaster made to look like a parade float. While inside the toaster, the Pop-Tart inquires about when to pop out, and the hungry person declares, “Yep, just one more minute …

Having all the information in the world at our fingertips doesn’t make it easier to communicate: it makes it harder. The more information you’re dealing with, the more difficult it is to filter

Sometimes bar charts are avoided because they are common. This is a mistake. Rather, bar charts should be leveraged because they are common, as this means less of a learning curve for your audience.

believe me it is not. Better still, let me prove it. From prehistoric cave paintings to the map of the London Underground, images, diagrams and charts have long been at the heart of human storytelling. The reason why is simple: our brains are wired for visuals. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it speaks,’ wrote the media theorist John Berger in the opening lines of his 1972 classic, Ways of Seeing.

From prehistoric cave paintings to the map of the London Underground, images, diagrams and charts have long been at the heart of human storytelling. The reason why is simple: our brains are wired for visuals. ‘Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognises before it speaks,’ wrote the media theorist John Berger in the opening lines of his 1972 classic, Ways of Seeing[1]. Neuroscience has since confirmed the dominant role of visualisation in human cognition. Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to vision and, when our eyes are open, vision accounts for two thirds of the electrical activity in the brain. It takes just 150 milliseconds for the brain to recognise and image and a mere 100 milliseconds more to attach a meaning to it[2]. Although we have blind spots in both of our eyes – where the optic nerve attaches to the retina – the brain deftly steps in to create the seamless illusion of a whole[3]. As a result, we are born pattern-spotters, seeing faces in clouds, ghosts in the shadows, and mythical beasts in the starts. And we learn best when there are pictures to look at. As the visual literacy expert Lynell Burmark explains, ‘unless our words, concepts and ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about seven bits of information…Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched[4]. With far-fewer pen strokes, and without the weight of technical language, images have immediacy – and when text and image send conflicting messages, it is the visual messages that most often wins[5]. So the old adage turns out to be true: a picture really is worth a thousand words.

There is a story in your data. But your tools don’t know what that story is. That’s where it takes you—the analyst or communicator of the information—to bring that story visually and contextually to life.

As if to prove I was willing to give this new adventure as a visual storyteller my best shot, I'd searched for the most colorful piece of clothing I owned in my minimal, mostly monochromatic closet. The winner: a white vintage Polaroid tee with a band of pink, orange, yellow, and blue stretched across my chest. Nothing like living on the wild side.

Star Wars changed everything in the industry, from pace and storytelling, to visual effects and sound.

Children don't realize how bad things are. This is their norm. They don't realize how much of their childhood is being stolen by screens. They simply have no escape. It follows them home. It follows them everywhere. The phone is always on their minds. Texts are constant, often misinterpreted, hurtful, with no visual cues. They take the place of learning how to have genuine conversations.

Las abstracciones se pueden iluminar con textos visuales, y usando palabras llave como ‘imaginemos’ o ‘ por ejemplo’.

Forward-thinking organizations look to empower more of their workers with data so they can make better-informed decisions and respond more quickly to market opportunities and challenges.

1. Create your first draft as though you’re storytelling traditionally. 2. Choose the platform(s) right for your story. 3. Identify what elements you need to build your story – audio, visual, interactive. 4. Learn the tools of the trade. 5. Create your supplemental or digital elements. 6. Combine all elements of the story. 7. Post to your platforms.

elements that only appear in digital storytelling, but not storytelling: ● Soundtrack ● Possible visual elements such as video, background images, or PowerPoint presentations ● Economy – purposeful withholding of specific information given in another format,

no es posible tener significado con sobrecarga de información.

La base de un gráfico útil es rara vez el diseño gráfico

uno debe correr hacia donde la pelota va a ir, no hacia donde está ahora.

recommend anything other than a white background.

In my experience, however, the best way to learn a tool is to use it. When you can’t figure out how to do something, don’t give up. Continue to play with the program and search Google for solutions. Any frustration you encounter will be worth it when you can bend your tool to your will!

Further develop the situation or problem by covering relevant background. Incorporate external context or comparison points. Give examples that illustrate the issue. Include data that demonstrates the problem. Articulate what will happen if no action is taken or no change is made. Discuss potential options for addressing the problem. Illustrate the benefits of your recommended solution.

Literature is the spirit of the Culture, the lifeblood. They’re one and the same. Words are everywhere. Storytelling is everywhere. Stories have been essential to human survival since prehistory: at their most base, they are how we communicate both threats and opportunities. They are how the subconscious sorts through problems as we rest; through the narratives that are dreams, we can go on and address life’s travails. Literature refines these functions, elevates them to the spiritual realm. That’s why words are so important, why literature is the highest art. Visual artworks, if not directly inspired by literature or telling their own stories, are still described in words. Dance is often performed as part of a story, and if not, is still described in words. The only thing that could conceivably rival it, as something unrelated, would be classical music, but even the masters in that field were often inspired by works in the Canon, and titled their compositions in words. Words give all things meaning. Stories are fundamental to the human experience.

visual syntax and the art of storytelling When forming phrases or narratives in ASL, ask yourself: What order makes the most sense visually? If you were to draw the scene on paper, what would you set up first? Consider translating the sentence “The cup is on the table.” First establish your noun, then describe placement or action: First, the table: Then, the cup: Then the placement of the two together in space: There is some flexibility to word order. For example, some signers might introduce both nouns, “cup” and “table,” first, then describe them after. TEST YOURSELF: When thinking about visual grammar, why does it make sense to share information about the table before the cup? NOW YOU TRY! Tell your partner about your childhood bedroom.

as we start creating content via our computer, something happens that causes us to form an attachment to it. This attachment can be such that, even if we know what we’ve created isn’t exactly on the mark or should be changed or eliminated, we are sometimes resistant to doing so because of the work we’ve already put in to get it to where it is.

After undertaking an entire analysis, it can be tempting to want to show your audience everything, as evidence of all of the work you did and the robustness of the analysis. Resist this urge. You are making your audience reopen all of the oysters! Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.

The story should ultimately be about your audience, not about you.

If you do succeed in persuading them, you’ve only done so on an intellectual basis. That’s not good enough, because people are not inspired to act by reason alone

tables interact with our verbal system, graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information.

it’s easy to spot a hawk in a sky full of pigeons, but as the variety of birds increases, that hawk becomes harder and harder to pick out.

In a city as diverse and culturally rich as Hyderabad, the demand for professional photographers has never been higher. From capturing timeless moments at weddings and documenting corporate events to creating stunning fashion portfolios and commercial campaigns, professional photographers in Hyderabad play a vital role in preserving memories and promoting businesses. Professional photographers in Hyderabad are not just individuals with cameras; they are visual storytellers, artists, and technicians. Their primary role is to use their expertise in photography to capture moments, emotions, and subjects in a way that conveys a specific message or narrative. One of the key aspects of professional photography is the ability to understand and cater to the specific needs of clients. This requires effective communication, as photographers must work closely with their clients to ensure that the final images align with their expectations.

Jason Bowen, a Pittsburgh native whose love for basketball (New York Knicks) intertwines with a passion for communicative storytelling. Aspiring to become a New York Times bestseller, Jason envisions a future where his narratives challenge societal norms, emphasizing privacy and freedom. His open-minded approach reflects a commitment to reshaping perspectives through the powerful medium of visual storytelling.

Here are some action words to help act as thought starters as you determine what you are asking of your audience: accept | agree | begin | believe | change | collaborate | commence | create | defend | desire | differentiate | do | empathize | empower | encourage | engage | establish | examine | facilitate | familiarize | form | implement | include | influence | invest | invigorate | know | learn | like | persuade | plan | promote | pursue | recommend | receive | remember | report | respond | secure | support | simplify | start | try | understand | validate

What would a successful outcome look like? If you only had a limited amount of time or a single sentence to tell your audience what they need to know, what would you say? In particular, I find that these last two questions can lead to insightful conversation.

3-minute story The 3-minute story is exactly that: if you had only three minutes to tell your audience what they need to know, what would you say? This is a great way to ensure you are clear on and can articulate the story you want to tell.

Who is your audience? What do you need them to know or do? This chapter describes the importance of understanding the situational context, including the audience, communication mechanism, and desired tone.

Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.

When we’re at the point of communicating our analysis to our audience, we really want to be in the explanatory space, meaning you have a specific thing you want to explain, a specific story you want to tell—probably about those two pearls.

Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.

What do you need your audience to know or do? This is the point where you think through how to make what you communicate relevant for your audience and form a clear understanding of why they should care about what you say.

If you simply present data, it’s easy for your audience to say, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and move on to the next thing. But if you ask for action, your audience has to make a decision whether to comply or not. This elicits a more productive reaction from your audience, which can lead to a more productive conversation—one that might never have been started if you hadn’t recommended the action in the first place.

I almost always use dark grey for the graph title. This ensures that it stands out, but without the sharp contrast you get from pure black on white (rather, I preserve the use of black for a standout color when I’m not using any other colors). A number of preattentive attributes are employed to draw attention to the “Progress to date” trend: color, thickness of line, presence of data marker and label on the final point, and the size of the corresponding text.

On the horizontal x-axis, we don’t need every single day labeled since we’re more interested in the overall trend, not what happened on a specific day. Because we have data through the 10th day of a 30-day month, I chose to label every 5th day on the x-axis (given that this is days we’re talking about, another potential solution would be to label every 7th day and/or add super-categories of week 1, week 2, etc.). This is one of those cases where there isn’t a single right answer: you should think about the context, the data, and how you want your audience to use the visual and make a deliberate decision in light of those things.

One thing to keep in mind with a table is that you want the design to fade into the background, letting the data take center stage. Don’t let heavy borders or shading compete for attention. Instead, think of using light borders or simply white space to set apart elements of the table.

Horizontal bar chart If I had to pick a single go-to graph for categorical data, it would be the horizontal bar chart, which flips the vertical version on its side. Why? Because it is extremely easy to read. The horizontal bar chart is especially useful if your category names are long, as the text is written from left to right, as most audiences read, making your graph legible for your audience.

Don’t show the second y-axis. Instead, label the data points that belong on this axis directly. Pull the graphs apart vertically and have a separate y-axis for each (both along the left) but leverage the same x-axis across both. Figure 2.27 illustrates these options. Figure 2.27 Strategies for avoiding a secondary y-axis

We’ll discuss six principles here: proximity, similarity, enclosure, closure, continuity, and connection.

Alignment The single change having the biggest impact in the preceding before-and-after example was the shift from center-aligned to left-justified text. In the original version, each block of text on the page is center-aligned. This does not create clean lines either on the left or on the right, which can make even a thoughtful layout appear sloppy. I tend to avoid center-aligned text for this reason.

Short-term memory Short-term memory has limitations. Specifically, people can keep about four chunks of visual information in their short-term memory at a given time. This means that if we create a graph with ten different data series that are ten different colors with ten different shapes of data markers and a legend off to the side, we’re making our audience work very hard going back and forth between the legend and the data to decipher what they are looking at.

By combining the visual and verbal, we set ourselves up for success when it comes to triggering the formation of long-term memories in our audience.

Generally, diagonal elements such as lines and text should be avoided. They look messy and, in the case of text, are harder to read than their horizontal counterparts. When it comes to the orientation of text, one study (Wigdor & Balakrishnan, 2005) found that the reading of rotated text 45 degrees in either direction was, on average, 52% slower than reading normally oriented text (text rotated 90 degrees in either direction was 205% slower on average). It is best to avoid diagonal elements on the page.

Note how, within each, the preattentive attribute grabs your attention, and how some attributes draw your eyes with greater or weaker force than others (for example, color and size are attention grabbing, whereas italics achieve a milder emphasis).

Especially in live presentation settings, repeated iterations of the same visual, with different pieces emphasized to tell different stories or different aspects of the same story (as demonstrated in Figures 4.7, 4.8, and 4.9), can be an effective strategy. This allows you to familiarize your audience with your data and visual first and then continue to leverage it in the manner illustrated.

Highlighting one aspect can make other things harder to see One word of warning in using preattentive attributes: when you highlight one point in your story, it can actually make other points harder to see. When you’re doing exploratory analysis, you should mostly avoid the use of preattentive attributes for this reason. When it comes to explanatory analysis, however, you should have a specific story you are communicating to your audience. Leverage preattentive attributes to help make that story visually clear.

My base color is grey, not black, to allow for greater contrast since color stands out more against grey than black. For my attention-grabbing color, I often use blue for a number of reasons: (1) I like it, (2) you avoid issues of colorblindness that we’ll discuss momentarily, and (3) it prints well in black-and-white. That said, blue is certainly not your only option (and you’ll see many examples where I deviate from my typical blue for various reasons).

Position on page Without other visual cues, most members of your audience will start at the top left of your visual or slide and scan with their eyes in zigzag motions across the screen or page. They see the top of the page first, which makes this precious real estate. Think about putting the most important thing here (see Figure 4.17). Figure 4.17 The zigzag “z” of taking in information on a screen or page

Affordances In the field of design, experts speak of objects having “affordances.” These are aspects inherent to the design that make it obvious how the product is to be used. For example, a knob affords turning, a button affords pushing, and a cord affords pulling. These characteristics suggest how the object is to be interacted with or operated. When sufficient affordances are present, good design fades into the background and you don’t even notice it.

The biggest shift was from a bar graph to a line graph. As we’ve discussed, line graphs typically make it easier to see trends over time. This shift also has the effect of visually reducing discrete elements, because the data that was previously five bars has been reduced to a single line with the end points highlighted. When we consider the full data being plotted, we’ve gone from 25 bars to 4 lines. The organization of the data as a line graph allows the use of a single x-axis that can be leveraged across all of the categories. This simplifies the processing of the information (rather than seeing the years in a legend at the left and then having to translate across the various groups of bars).

According to Southwest CEO Gary Kelly, a company’s purpose should answer the question, “Why do we exist?” Kelly adds, “We exist to connect people to what’s important in their lives through friendly, reliable, and low-cost air travel.”6 Only storytelling can rally passionate people around a common purpose. Each week Kelly gives a “shout out”—public praise—to employees who have gone above and beyond to show great customer service. Each month the Southwest Spirit magazine features the story of an employee who has gone above and beyond. Southwest highlights positive behaviors through a variety of recognition programs and awards. Finally, internal corporate videos are filled with real examples and stories to help employees visualize what each step of the purpose looks and feels like.

Beyond annoying our audience by trying to sound smart, we run the risk of making our audience feel dumb. In either case, this is not a good user experience for our audience. Avoid

The unique thing you get with a pie chart is the concept of there being a whole and, thus, parts of a whole. But if the visual is difficult to read, is it worth it? In

Action titles on slides The title bar at the top of your PowerPoint slide is precious real estate: use it wisely! This is the first thing your audience encounters on the page or screen and yet so often it gets used for redundant descriptive titles (for example, “2015 Budget”). Instead use this space for an action title. If you have a recommendation or something you want your audience to know or do, put it here (for example, “Estimated 2015 spending is above budget”).

Figure 5.10 Add action title and annotation In Figure 5.10, thoughtful use of text makes the design accessible. It’s clear to the audience what they are looking at as well as what they should pay attention to and why.

Never again will you simply show data. Rather, you will create visualizations that are thoughtfully designed to impart information and incite action.

La información no es conocimiento, y el conocimiento no es sabiduría”.

Los libros de filosofía más vendidos y más populares de la historia tienen un común denominador: los ejemplos visuales.

Design is your silent storyteller. The visual aesthetic you share with the world tells a story about the values you uphold. When your audience is not ready or willing to listen, a strong visual can capture even the most evasive of minds. Design is not ornamental or secondary: it can propel your stories far beyond the spaces you initially planned for.

By developing a habit of telling ourselves stories about what’s going on around us, we learn to sharpen where our attention goes. These storytelling moments can be as small as trying to envision a coming meeting while driving to work—forcing yourself to imagine how the meeting will start, what points you will raise if the boss asks for comments, what objections your coworkers are likely to bring up—or they can be as big as a nurse telling herself stories about what infants ought to look like as she walks through a NICU. If you want to make yourself more sensitive to the small details in your work, cultivate a habit of imagining, as specifically as possible, what you expect to see and do when you get to your desk. Then you’ll be prone to notice the tiny ways in which real life deviates from the narrative inside your head. If you want to become better at listening to your children, tell yourself stories about what they said to you at dinnertime last night. Narrate your life, as you are living it, and you’ll encode those experiences deeper in your brain. If you need to improve your focus and learn to avoid distractions, take a moment to visualize, with as much detail as possible, what you are about to do. It is easier to know what’s ahead when there’s a well-rounded script inside your head.

Si pudiera sintetizar todos esos puntos en pocas preguntas, y servirme de ello para crear un patrón universal, sería más o menos así. a) ¿Puedes poner un ejemplo visual de algo o alguien real o hipotético que resuma el problema? b) ¿Puedes resumir el problema en una frase de una línea? c) ¿Puedes decir cómo hemos llegado a esto? d) ¿Puedes aportar datos de fuentes fiables? e) ¿Puedes decir cómo solucionarlo? f) ¿Puedes exponer ejemplos de alguien que lo haya hecho? g) ¿Puedes resumir qué pasará si lo hacemos bien? h) ¿Puedes resumir qué pasará si lo hacemos mal?

Tras leer muchas historias de The Economist, he caído en la cuenta de que existe un patrón que se repite en casi todas ellas, incluso cuando se trata de análisis de alto nivel. El gancho: una descripción visual donde hay un protagonista, o una situación que resume todo en un texto con descripciones visuales (Imagine usted que...). Definición del problema. En pocas frases, se resume cuál es el problema del que se trata. El problema suele estar precedido de la locución “pero” o “sin embargo”. Suele ser el ‘punto de giro’. Datos que sostienen el problema. Se aportan datos de fuentes fiables para demostrar que es un problema verdadero

Tras leer muchas historias de The Economist, he caído en la cuenta de que existe un patrón que se repite en casi todas ellas, incluso cuando se trata de análisis de alto nivel. El gancho: una descripción visual donde hay un protagonista, o una situación que resume todo en un texto con descripciones visuales (Imagine usted que...). Definición del problema. En pocas frases, se resume cuál es el problema del que se trata. El problema suele estar precedido de la locución “pero” o “sin embargo”. Suele ser el ‘punto de giro’. Datos que sostienen el problema. Se aportan datos de fuentes fiables para demostrar que es un problema verdadero y serio. Suele haber una cronología. Pueden ser cifras o una descripción científica del asunto. Aquí el problema se transforma en drama o desafío con datos. Desarrollo. Tesis a favor para resolver el problema. Y tesis en contra que detalla qué va a pasar si la situación no se afronta. Propuesta. ¿Qué se está haciendo para solucionarlo? Riesgos. ¿Se están consiguiendo resultados? Análisis. Si no se está consiguiendo resultados, ¿a qué se debe? Comparaciones. ¿Qué se está haciendo en otros sitios? ¿Funciona? Conclusión. ¿Cómo aplicar esas soluciones en nuestro caso y cuáles son los riesgos si no se aplican? Esta última parte, suele incluir una oración que comienza en  ‘if’ (el condicional español “si”): es la advertencia final. “Si no

Photography is a powerful visual storytelling tool often underestimated by many. As a medium and in it's purest form, it possesses the ability to prescribe desire, joy, sadness or pain. An image is potent enough to change the world's view in an instant.

- Hice mi tienda fácil de encontrar (con los carteles). - Cuidé la parte visual (con mis dibujos). - Comuniqué cómo era (describí sus características). - Comuniqué para qué servía (hablé de sus ventajas y beneficios). - Conté mi relación con el producto (storytelling - “mi favorita”).

Model visual #5: horizontal stacked bars Figure 6.5 shows the results of survey questions on relative priorities in a developing nation. This is a great deal of information, but due to strategic emphasizing and de-emphasizing of components, it does not become visually overwhelming. Figure 6.5 Horizontal stacked bars Stacked bars make sense here given the nature of what is being graphed: top priority (in first position in the darkest shade), 2nd priority (in second position and a slightly lighter shade of the same color), and 3rd priority (in third position and an even lighter shade of the same color). Orienting the chart horizontally means the category names along the left are easy to read in horizontal text.

First, To whom are you communicating? It is important to have a good understanding of who your audience is and how they perceive you. This can help you to identify common ground that will help you ensure they hear your message. Second, What do you want your audience to know or do?

Your story is nothing but a mirror. It will emotionally move your audience into action only when it will reflect a total eclipse between your brand story and your customer's personal story.

Your story is nothing but a mirror. It will emotionally move your audience into action only when it will reflect a total eclipse between your brand story and your customer's personal story.

En resumen, si tuviese que exponer un patrón por el cual se guiasen los filósofos más leídos, sería este: -Lenguaje visual. Uso de palabras concretas. –Ejemplos y analogías. –Preguntas. –Oraciones breves. –Relatos de actualidad. –Reseñas históricas. –Comparaciones. Por último, el libro de filosofía más vendido en los últimos tiempos es El mundo de Sofía, del noruego Jostein Gaarder. ¿En qué se parece a La república de Platón. –Todo se construye a través de un relato. Es storytelling filosófico. –Es un diálogo entre un profesor y una niña. –El profesor (el sabio) despierta la curiosidad de la niña con preguntas y enigmas (lo cual produce dopamina). –El profesor explica el pensamiento de los filósofos contando su vida y sus anécdotas (empatía, es decir, oxitocina). –El profesor explica los grandes conceptos de filosofía recurriendo a analogías. Una de las mejores analogías es la que explica con las piezas de Lego, el nacimiento del concepto de átomo de Demócrito hace más de 2500 años.

While tables interact with our verbal system, graphs interact with our visual system, which is faster at processing information.

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer. Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

We’ll first talk about the three elements that make a great story (surprise, emotions, and visual moments), then five specific techniques you can use to add these elements to your story.

When it comes to the form and function of our data visualizations, we first want to think about what it is we want our audience to be able to do with the data (function) and then create a visualization (form) that will allow for this with ease.

You know you’ve achieved perfection, not when you have nothing more to add, but when you have nothing to take away