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Design of data figures

Nature Methods volume 7, page 665 (2010)Cite this article

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Data figures or graphs are essential to life-science communication. Using these tools authors encode information that readers later decode. It is imperative that graphs are interpreted correctly. Despite the importance and widespread use of graphs, we primarily rely on our intuition, common sense and precedent in published material when creating them—a largely unscientific approach.

In 1967, the French cartographer Jacques Bertin provided a wide theoretical framework for information visualization1. His analysis focused on the visual properties of graphical elements such as shape, orientation, color, texture, volume and size for displaying quantitative variation. He defined several visual operations needed to extract information stored in graphs. Cleveland and McGill were one of the first to measure people's ability to efficiently and accurately carry out these elementary perceptual tasks2 (Table 1).

Table 1 Elementary perceptual tasks
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Figure 1: Some visual estimations are more easily carried out than others.

References

  1. Bertin, J. Semiology of Graphics, English translation by W.J. Berg (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wisconsin, USA, 1983).

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  2. Cleveland, W.S. & McGill, R. Science 229, 828–833 (1985).

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  3. Wong, B. Nat. Methods 7, 573 (2010).

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  1. Bang Wong is the creative director of the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard and an adjunct assistant professor in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.,

    Bang Wong

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Wong, B. Design of data figures. Nat Methods 7, 665 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1038/nmeth0910-665

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