Visual Communication of Information

At Presentation Magazine we are great believers in the power of visual information. A lot of presentation research shows that really “a picture is worth a thousand words” – with message retention being increased over words by a factor of five. It was a real treat to come across a presentation by Karl Fast on Visualization of Information.

Karl Fast is a doctoral student from the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ontario, Canada and has kindly allowed us to reproduce extracts of his presentation “Information Visualization: Failed Experiment or Future Revolution?

“Now I’m going to illustrate some of the basic principles of information visualization by taking a simple example and building it up. I am not going to explain techniques like the perspective wall, or the differences between geometric and semantic zooming. Rather, this is just a simple example to illustrate the basic ideas.”

With a little time we could work out the days, but if we are to add in some simple visual colour coding.

temperature chart with numbers highlighted

This illustrates the power of visual perception. Graphic designers use this all the time when creating posters. They know how to make some things stand out. But information visualization aims to exploit this in a different way: through interaction.

But we can abstract away the numerical data, transforming it into a visual representation. Note that these boxes could represent almost anything, not just temperature. We are moving away from a system designed specifically to deal with temperature, to a framework that can handle a wide range of data.

This is one of the best examples of visual communications to portray information that I have seen in a while and it demonstrates that some simple concepts can be highly effective.

If you would like to view a full version of the presentation you can view it on Karl’s web site.