Book Review: The Wall Street Journal Guide to Information Graphics, by Dona M. Wong
Dona M. Wong’s slim volume
is a beautifully printed guide to “The Do’s and Don’ts of Presenting Data, Facts, and Figures”. As a former graphics director at the WSJ she set standards that made sense of complex data for readers. As a student of well-known PowerPoint critic Edward Tufte she takes the theories of the author of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information out of the realm of academia and applies them in the world of modern finance and content-rich, data-intensive charts beloved of subject matter experts in the corporate world.
The book is a series of tutorials on all aspects of presenting data, from the choice of color and font to the correct way to align numbers and represent proportions in pie charts. It’s all deceptively simple – a simplicity which so often evades the grasp of the engineering or financial professional who is at a loss to communicate the essence of their data in a way people can understand and avoids burying the audience in detail:
Examples of confusing, misleading, and ineffective graphics are everywhere today. Many charts have sophisticated and intelligent underlying information , but the presentation fails to convey the intended message.
Each page of Wong’s book serves as a ready reference on the right way to communicate information.
Three essential elements of good information graphics
Wong states that good graphics are built on three elements:
- Rich content – to bring meaning to the graphic.
- Inviting visualization – that interprets the content and highlights the essence of the information for the audience.
- Sophisticated execution – that brings the content and graphics to life.
Essential steps to create effective charts
The basics on which the book is based are worth memorizing as an antidote to clients who feel a need to do a data dump on an audience. In summary:
Start with authoritative sources … identify your key message … filter and simplify the data … choose the right chart type to present the data … review the outcome against the sources … let the data speak for itself … create the right comparisons … supply a reference point to frame the data … follow basic rules of legibility.
Do’s and Don’ts
The bulk of the book is a series of Do’s and Don’ts that examine each type of chart in turn. For example, with pie charts, Wong makes it clear why the largest segment should always be placed to the right of the 12 o’clock position:
It’s astonishing how often graphics designers ignore this simple rule and print counter-intuitive charts, as in this example published in the FT on Saturday December 17 (p. 12):
Low-hanging fruit
In fact, finding charts to improve is not a problem. Go browse the PowerPoint archives or visit the financial and engineering web pages in your organization. Armed with a copy of this book you’ll find lots of low-hanging watermelons to perform a makeover on, and score some brownie points with the VP of Communications in the process.
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