Accurat, 8 steps for powerful dataviz

8 steps to create a
powerful
multi-layered dataviz
accurat.it

Accurat who?
Accurat is an agency and consultancy based in Milan and New York.
We design experiences of interaction between people, information and
contexts.
We do this by analyzing data, contexts and contents and creating
dynamic and static data visualizations; editorial products, interactive
platforms and mobile tools.

our visualizations on La Lettura:
This presentation is about a data visualization column we regularly
publish on La Lettura, the Sunday cultural supplement of Corriere della
Sera (the main Italian newspaper).

Multi layered dataviz?
This presentation dissects the process behind our data visualizations:
How to build powerful, multi-layered visual stories?

rule n.1: stay informed!
Every week we choose a topic we think is particularly interesting to
explore, ranging from current affairs and news to historical or cultural
phenomena; we then analyze different kind of datasets trying to identify a
main story - hopefully a non common one - that is worth to be told through
a data visualization. (Story is always the key.)

how about the story?
it has to be:

catchy
+ clear
+ provide several
layer of exploration:
non-linear storytelling, where people can
get lost in details, elements and sub-stories.

rule n.2: think about a non linear-layered storytelling
Everything runs around the concepts of layering and making hierarchies
clear, for both the data analysis (the stories we want to tell)
and the visual composition (main architecture and aesthetic value).

“ if we consider our collective
presentation as composed of
the pieces within a tale, we aim
to build a singular “greater-
story” built through the
layering of sub stories,
or story components.

the layering process:

(1) Composing the main architecture of the visualization
(2) Positioning singular elements within the main framework.

(3) Constructing shaped elements of
dimensionality and form

(4) Elucidating internal relationships
between elements.

(5) Labeling and identifying elements

(6) Supplementing the greater story through the addition
of “minor or tangental tales” elements.

(7) Providing small visual explanations
such as a legend or key
(8) Fine-tuning and stylizing of elements shapes,
colors, and weights to make hierarchies pop out.

be patient:
we will show you our dataviz,
we promise.

(1) Composing the main
architecture of the visualization

- the formalized base through which the
main story will be mapped and displayed,

- upon this one we’ll see the most relevant
patterns emerging from the story: the
essential “map” that shall conceptually
identify where we are.

(This base is essentially a matrix or pattern
that will serve as our organizer. It may be
composed of cells, or distances, or other
interrelated multiples.)

(2) Positioning singular
elements within the main framework.

this process is also one which will test the
effectiveness of the main architecture:

- the placement of elements reveals or
confirms weaknesses and strengths which
may lead to modification of the main
architecture.

(3) Constructing shaped
elements of dimensionality and form

- As these elements have form they must
also be identified through colors, shapes
and dimensions according to
opportunities to establish categorizations,
thus advancing clarity and relationships
that serve to enhance the story.

(4) Elucidating internal
relationships between elements.

- these links, directives, and
qualifiers serve to give the
story a comprehensive
texture and correlate
dependencies within the
story.

(5) Labeling and Identifying elements

Labeling and Identifying through the
addition of explanatory labels and short
texts provides requisite “last mile” clarity
throughout the presentation.

(6) Supplementing the greater story through the
addition of “minor or tangental tales” elements.

We consider this a very important step to
contextualize the phenomena in a wider
world. These components link the story to
external ideas, other times, or other
places. Elements that are rendered here
may come from very diverse sources—
analysis that is undertaken once we have
strongly established the core story. These
elements must not distract from the
main story.

(7) Providing small visual explanations
such as a legend or key

this is to assists readers and the general public
who may not be familiar with norms of data
visualization.
The process usually involves simplification of
the general architecture (e.g. the x and y axes,
base timelines, or map components) as well as
minimal explicit shapes, colors, and dimensions
of singular elements. These explanations also
provide units of measurement for distances and
volumes, etc.

(8) Fine-tuning and stylizing of elements shapes,
colors, and weights to make hierarchies pop out.

Highlighting the relevant and visual
constructing other several background layers of
information should bring information selectively
and sequentially revealed, helping readers
discover stories by themselves and recognizing
the patterns or interrelationships from one
element within the story to another them all and
the process beyond them.

ok! but now show
us your dataviz!

you can see the whole collection here:
http://visual.ly/users/accurat

but we’ll now look closer
at each individually!

Subterranean
veins of
Europe

Have you ever thought
about going from
London to Paris
riding the tube? How
long are the
underground veins
that run below major
cities in Europe? With
this visualization we
compare the total
length and fares of
the different subway
systems across the
continent, revealing
interesting insights
and confronting the
actual sizes on the
map.

The visualization is
based on a map
locating each city in its
actual position, where
we simply cut the
geographical
morphology in order
to enlighten this
imaginary idea of
traveling below the
earth.

Each city is
represented by a circle
the radius of which is
the total length of its
subway extension.
The main tale is
immediately
recognizable: which
cities are overlapping
or so close to one
another that they may
almost be reached by
subway?

The visualization then
provides lots of other
information,
so that each city
subway system could
be compared and
readers desire could
spend additional time:
- daily consumption
(number of passengers
represented with light
pictograms),
- the colors of the
lines (numerically
ordered and
represented by colored
tiny squares),
- the cost of one-way
ticket (indicated by
the stroke thickness of
each circle),

(And we also
represented cities like
Valencia which
underground lengths is
minor that 20 km,
just by simply locating
this black dot on the
map, and we did this
because it's funny to
see some of them that
could be reached from
other cities'
underground systems.)

It’s then suggested that
a possible evaluation
of estimated distance
from Milan (where
Corriere della Sera is
headquartered) with
white (cutting the
background) light lines
pointing Milan as the
center.

Then, on the right
Zoom bottom part of the
page we also added
further visual
comparisons:
using the same metric
scale of the main
visualization we tried
to give readers an idea
how the actual length
of all the
metropolitan lines
(and so subterranean
veins of Europe) is;
comparing it with the
Danubio river,
with the main Italian
(and well known)
highway;
with Alps mountains
total lengths and with
the Tour de France as
well.

Painters’ time

This dataviz has been inspired from an article by Malcolm Gladwell published in the New Yorker,
in which he tries to unveil the rules behind creativity and genius, comparing those artists that succeeded very
early in their career, the young geniuses like Picasso, with those who had to wait until their mature years and had
to practice way more to see their true art take form,

Was it possible to draw a timeline that showed in what period of their lives the most famous painters of all times
painted their masterpieces?

The general architecture of the visualization was then clear to us:
painters should have been situated along a timeline (enlightening centuries)and located within the main
architecture according to teir birth yeard,
the painter “entity” is represented as the line of the lenght of his life, with fertiles periods defined within 3 main
parts: young (up to 35 yo), adult (36 to 60 yo) and mature (61and over), normalizing intervals according to the
average life expectancy for each century.

We then defined our own criteria to define which paintings to consider as a masterpiece:
- (1) for each painter we positioned on life-line first the “official” point of view of which peace the Italian edition
of the Garzanti Art Encycloped refers as the master; / which is the one that you see squared
- (2) secondary we put also a level of“people’s” choice; the first result related to the name of the painter on
Google Images. / which is the other one, not squared

The depiction of the painting was an opportunity to add further layers of information,
the main colors of the art piece within the squares, size of the frames (actual sizes of the squares) and the
painting technique with a small grey symbol,

The guys that you see just named in grey, as Jason Pollock here, with just his birth year below, was because of
the fact that at a certain point we had a problem: 90 painters: really too many if we want to maintain an
overall clear and legible composition!!
We came back to our art expert at Corriere della Sera asking him to select the 45 that could be considered real
milestones. Within the visualization we represented the 45 left painters anyway by positioning their name and
birth date on the chart in the correct position, so that we were able to make this further content available to be
explored by readers even if with less details.

Trying to look at the big picture of the story we wanted to tell we felt the urge to suggest patterns’ changing in
time with a reference table enlightening main colors, tecniques, sizes changing through centuries as well as the
average age of painters producing their masterpieces.

Zoom

Final step was to create a clear and easily understandable legend explaining how to read the visualization, and
how to get around the shapes, colors, and symbols. And this part is very important as well.

Making a clear legend is really very difficult: you have to really sum up and make all the design choices you
had “abstract”, for whom is not into your datasets.

Painters’ time

the final effort is to provide a final graphic fine-tuning:
which is a very last step that delivers the visualization with its final beauty.

Painters’ time (backstage)

Let us then just for this visualization show you some backstage parts.
- so at thevery beginning we thought that the time (centuries and life of the painters)
could have been horizontal,
- we always try different mock-ups to see how everything it fits.

but actually as you could probably see here horizontal depicted painters with horizontals names / surnames,
is not really providing clearness to the overall.


Piero della Francesca
1412

Storie
della Vera Croce

Sacra
conversazione
1492

There was something not convincing to us, and we tried to rotate everything 90 degrees.

- yes: actually before trying on digital, we everytime sketch (lots lots lots of sketches): to us,
ideas came always with pens and paper before opening a white new illustrator page.


Here is when we decided to put the temporal dimension in vertical,
and we here tested the overall locating ust the painters that were in a kind of very dense situation.

this vertical lines, to us, better give you the idea of “life lenthgs”,
of something with a beginning and an end.
(we know it could be very subjective as a point of view, but it’s part of the game!)


Well then, here is the moment when we try to see if everything will fit,
before actually putting real contents on the picture:

so you can see that the main architecture is defined.
there’s space for reference tables and legend.


and then we start refining.
putting the background and exact data, that confirmed that a lot of space is left in the upper right part


and another step here: trying to deal with legend and reference table

Painters’ time ﬁnal version

and here we are with the final versio: and you see that legend is kind of popping
out because of the darker background that we choose.

and to us now hierarchies are quite clear.
and we’re finally happy
:-)

ok,
we got it, please
go quicker

January if you want to be a football player

January if you want to be a football player explores the idea of a “relative age
phenomenon”, and if such is verifiable even for soccer major teams. We reference the
author Malcolm Gladwell again, respective to his book Outliers, where he describes how he
found a very high concentration of hockey-players born in the first months of the year,
particularly in the youngest leagues.

This is supposed to be because of the sport selection rules of the western system: children are divided into
classes based by the year of birth: “bigger” ones are most likely selected for higher leagues and so have more
chances to practice at higher levels while they’re growing, this ends up in a huge disproportion in the
distribution of months of birth even in the NHL.

First 30 european major footbal team are located within the horizontal line, ordered by their results in last
European Championship.
The main visualization (with triangles) explores the number of players borned in the differen months
(vertical line) for each team.

the orange triangles are for the young league
the pink triangles are for the most famous / oldest league


and finally, we can spot this “relative age” pattern as well in soccer teams, if we look the the overall!


As always, further details could be explored and useful to compare.

then in this case we used the main visualization as a reference to start with the legend,
that is actually corresponding / left side / to where we placed elements in the visualization

I’m Montalbano!

In I’m Montalbano we visualized the development of the character of Commissario
Montalbano throughout all of the 19 novels written by Andrea Camilleri, exploring
meaningful trends in the fictional life of the police chief.
each vertical line that you see is one of the 19 books, ordered by publication date,
and starting and ending with the actual incipit and end sentence of the book.
the lenthg of the line of the book is given by the number of pages.

Time machine for art movies

Time machine for art movies explores the 52 best movies of all time, according to
the British Film Institute (http://www.bfi.org.uk/news/50-greatest-films-all-time),
and investigates the relationship between the year of release and the time-setting of
the story. Further details (provided close to the time-setting of the story) show
interesting patterns on genres, durations, reality vs. fantasy, nationality, and
awards over time.

Visualizing the future

Visualizing the future bases on a selection of speculative fiction captions collected here: (http://
www.theawl.com/2012/08/a-timeline-of-future-events) by Jane Hu. The visualization analyses 62 foretold
future events. Each event is described within main typologies (are they mainly social, scientific, technologic,
politic?), exploring the year it was predicted, the genre of the book, the age of the author, and more than all,
dividing them into positive, neutral
or negative events. Finally, good news, in 802.701 the world will keep on existing.

Empires
strike
again

Empires Strike Again
explores the reason
why the biggest
empires collapsed. The
visualization proposes
a new historical,
geographical and
demographical render
of 21 big emperors
since 2,500 years ago.
Empires are visualized
according to the
moment and reason of
their fall: more
information about
size, population,
govern and geography
are visually provided
for each one.

Continents’
showdown

Continents’
Showdown creates a
new map of the world
visually comparing
continents and their
sizes; rivers,
mountains, lakes and
island dimensions;
cities population,
density and even the
number
of passengers that
every year transits on
the most important
airports. Playing with
scales, to make
everything actually
comparable.

The More You
Study,
The Longer
You Live

What is truly influencing
life expectancy? Could it
be the GDP per capita?
What about the size of
the family and the level
of education?
Is it better to live in a
urban environment? We
compared many
differences of countries
all over the world on
these topics discovering,
through a powerful
visual rendering, that it
may turn out that the
more you study, the
longer you live. It might
also be possible, of
course, that the longer
one lives, the more they
study!

a formal journalism based
information design and info-
spatial aesthetic
“A journalist can borrow tools and techniques from literature, and
be inspired by great fiction writing, but he will never allow her
stories to become literature. That notion applies to visualization,
which is, above all, a functional art. The role of an information
architect is to anticipate this process and generate order before
people’s brains try to do it on their own.”

Alberto Cairo,
the functional art

8 steps to create a
multi-layered dataviz
write us at:
info@accurat.it

or give us a call at:
Italy +39 338 2977662
US +1 (917) 982 6740
www.accurat.it

this presentation takes its basis from the
article we published on:
PIIM Journal Vol.4, 2012, with the precious help of
Professor William Bevington.

Accurat, 8 steps for powerful dataviz

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