“There is a magic in graphs. The profile of a curve reveals in a flash a whole situation — the life history of an epidemic, a panic, or an era of prosperity. The curve informs the mind, awakens the imagination, convinces.” – Henry D. Hubbard in the preface to William C. Brinton’s Graphic Presentation, 1939.
Data visualization translates words and numbers into visual cues such as color, size, position, and shape. Humans can process such visual cues much more easily and quickly than words and numbers. Today, I’m here to talk about shape because I don’t think we turn to shape often enough to engage and educate with data. The three area charts below provide a great example of the power of shape. The charts show estimates of the distribution of annual income among all world citizens over the last two centuries. By considering the change in the shape of the data across the three time periods and in relation to the poverty line, we learn a lot. Most significantly, we learn that, over the 215 year time period, the majority of people went from living below the poverty line to living above it. We learn even more by considering the shape of the distribution for each color-coded region.
So consider taking a page from this playbook. Rather than showing change over time in one chart. Consider using shape to tell the story by showing the distribution of something (e.g. income, course grades, number of clients) at different time periods in adjacent area charts.
Source: Our World in Data
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Got the feeling that you and your colleagues would use your data more effectively if you could see it better? Data Viz for Nonprofits (DVN) can help you get the ball rolling with an interactive data dashboard and beautiful charts, maps, and graphs for your next presentation, report, proposal, or webpage. Through a short-term consultation, we can help you to clarify the questions you want to answer and goals you want to track. DVN then visualizes your data to address those questions and track those goals.
