Wednesday, November 8, 2017

information graphics - How to visualize data? Which software should I use?


I'm interested to know what sort of software - beyond basic standard graphics out of Excel - people use to generate data visualisations.


Do you craft things by hand and then build them in something like InDesign? I'm fascinated by the process that changes a table of data into a visual esthetic and would also welcome reading recommendations.



Answer



Adobe Illustrator actually has some very under-utilized capabilities to enhance chart representations of data. There's a good tutorial by Mordy Golding here, and his Lynda.com tutorials also go into this in excellent detail. For the kind of work I do, I'll use Illustrator in this way, or build things by hand.


For inspiration, and to give you an idea of how far data visualization can be taken with large datasets, check out this video of Hans Rosling's work. Search "data visualization" on YouTube for a bunch of other great examples.


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