Visualizing with Text

by Richard Brath

Visualizing with Text uncovers the rich palette of text elements usable in visualizations from simple labels through to documents. Using a multidisciplinary research effort spanning across fields including visualization, typography, and cartography, it builds a solid foundation for the design space of text in visualization. The book illustrates many new kinds of visualizations, including microtext lines, skim formatting, and typographic sets that solve some of the shortcomings of well-known visualization techniques. Key The author website, including teaching exercises and interactive demos and code, can be found . Designers, developers, and academics can use this book as a reference and inspiration for new approaches to visualization in any application that uses text.

268 pages, Paperback

Published November 2, 2020

Reviews

[Lori Palen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh. 2.5 stars, maybe? I think I wasn’t the intended audience for this book…it seems more appropriate for machine learning folks, linguists, and typography enthusiasts. The tone was very academic, and there was lots of repetition. There were some novel and interesting examples, but I thought many others were ineffective…hard to read or interpret, too much data included. The author put a lot of stock in encoding data into text attributes (e.g., weight, italics, width, typeface), but I thought that was tough to digest and would be better represented in a series of separate visuals. It was hard to imagine use cases for many of the visuals, as either explanatory or exploratory visuals.