Figure 6.1 Line graph

A change in colors signals just that—a change. So leverage this when you want your audience to feel change for some reason, but never simply for the sake of novelty.

we want to limit this sort of cognitive burden on our audience. We don’t want to make our audience work to get at the information, because in doing so, we run the risk of losing their attention.

chronologically. By way of example, if we think about the general analytical process, it looks something like this: we identify a problem, we gather data to better understand the situation, we analyze the data (look at it one way, look at it another way, tie in other things to see if they had an impact, etc.), we emerge with a finding or solution,

To whom are you communicating?

Humans’ brains have a finite amount of this mental processing power. As designers of information, we want to be smart about how we use our audience’s brain power.

The rest of the data is preserved for context, but pushed to the background so it doesn’t compete for attention. Slightly different shades of grey were used so you can still focus on one or the other series of data at a time, but it doesn’t distract from the clear emphasis on the red series.

Figure 3.10 Graph with y-axis line removed

How can you use data to help make your point?