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Beautiful Visualization: Looking at Data through the Eyes of Experts (Theory in Practice) 1st Edition

by Julie Steele (Editor), Noah Iliinsky (Editor)

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Visualization is the graphic presentation of data -- portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that efficiently generate insight and new understanding.

This book examines the methods of two dozen visualization experts who approach their projects from a variety of perspectives -- as artists, designers, commentators, scientists, analysts, statisticians, and more. Together they demonstrate how visualization can help us make sense of the world.

Explore the importance of storytelling with a simple visualization exercise
Learn how color conveys information that our brains recognize before we're fully aware of it
Discover how the books we buy and the people we associate with reveal clues to our deeper selves
Recognize a method to the madness of air travel with a visualization of civilian air traffic
Find out how researchers investigate unknown phenomena, from initial sketches to published papers

Contributors include:

Nick Bilton, Michael E. Driscoll, Jonathan Feinberg, Danyel Fisher, Jessica Hagy, Gregor Hochmuth, Todd Holloway, Noah Iliinsky, Eddie Jabbour, Valdean Klump, Aaron Koblin, Robert Kosara, Valdis Krebs, JoAnn Kuchera-Morin et al., Andrew Odewahn, Adam Perer, Anders Persson, Maximilian Schich, Matthias Shapiro, Julie Steele, Moritz Stefaner, Jer Thorp, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Michael Young.

ISBN-10

1449379869
ISBN-13

978-1449379865
Edition

1st
Publisher

O'Reilly Media
Publication date

2010
July 27
Language

EN
English
Dimensions

7.0 x 0.7 x 9.2
inches
Length

415
Pages
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Julie Steele is an Editor at O'Reilly currently working on titles related to Python, SQL, PHP, web frameworks and CMS, databases (relational and non-relational), big data and cloud computing, and data visualization. She's also interested in data transparency and open government, and recently completed a master's degree in political science at Rutgers University.

Noah Iliinsky has spent the last several years thinking about effective approaches to creating diagrams and other types of information visualization. He also works in interface and interaction design, all from a functional and user-centered perspective. Before becoming a designer he was a programmer for several years. He has a master's in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, and a bachelor's in Physics from Reed College.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ O'Reilly Media; 1st edition (July 27, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 415 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1449379869
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1449379865
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.62 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 7 x 0.68 x 9.19 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,163,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #261 in Digital Video Production (Books)
- #426 in Data Mining (Books)
- #711 in Data Processing

Customer Reviews:
3.9 39 ratings

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Noah Iliinsky
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Noah Iliinsky has spent the last several years thinking about effective approaches to creating diagrams and other types of information visualization. He also works in interface and interaction design, all from a functional and user-centered perspective. Before becoming a designer he was a programmer for several years. He has a master's in Technical Communication from the University of Washington, and a bachelor's in Physics from Reed College.
See more on the author's page
Julie Steele
Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.
Julie Steele is an editor at O'Reilly Media interested in connecting people and ideas. She finds beauty in discovering new ways to understand complex systems, and so enjoys topics related to organizing, storing, and visualizing data. She holds a Master's degree in Political Science (International Relations) from Rutgers University and is excited to be developing Gov 2.0 content for O'Reilly.
Julie also works with topics related to Python, PHP and SQL, and lives in the New York City area, where she eats, reads, codes, and practices yoga.
See more on the author's page

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5

39 global ratings

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Amazon Customer

Great Design Guide for Data

Reviewed in the United States on March 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

Stop making bad decks with useless slides and graphs and buy this book.

Reviewed in the United States on November 6, 2016

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The essays in this book are really interesting and thought provoking.

Helpful

Rupesh Verma

Exploration, discovery and presentation

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2010

Verified Purchase

I feel the major areas where good visualization adds value is - avenues of knowledge discovery, information presentation or simply context exploration where one does not know beforehand what insights data may reveal or the extent of relationships between data points. It can be debated that good visualizations could possibly increase cognitive resources available to our minds and decrease conceptual load that has to be dealt with at one time. Visual analytics is an invaluable tool for divergent thinking as well. Coming up with good visualizations is hard but its impact can be immediate and convincing. The visual impact is probabaly more because visual pathways have higher bandwidth at the systems level directly to our reptilian brain whereas logical reasoning resides on the neocortex. Sometimes we just have to see to believe.

The book does an excellent job of visiting various applicable domains. There is enough variety to keep you occupied. Its covers visualizing social datasets(link-node), hierarchical datasets(trees), categorical datasets(relational), time-varying datasets and other most commonly found datasets in scientific and information visualizations. Most chapters are well written with plenty of visuals. If you are an ardent fan of visuals you probabaly have seen everything in this book at one place or another. I think a significant part of the information is derived from papers or other well known publications. You can find almost anything by taking the visualcomplexity website as a starting point. However, the book can save you the research and is an excellent introductory text to expand your knowledge on visualizations.

That being said, I feel its little expensive for its size and as most content is there on the web already, O'Reilly should have listed it at slightly lesser cost. In case you are not going to buy, its a 5-star book no doubt.

23 people found this helpful

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Josh

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 22, 2015

Verified Purchase

Beautifull illustrations

Reviewed in the United States on August 25, 2011

You'd think that a book that calls itself "beautiful", would understand the basics of graphics DTP and printing. Sadly this book is marred by extensive use of raster images instead of vector ones, making edges fuzzy, text annotations practically illegible in many cases, and even blacks are most often composite (ie ugly brown made up of CMY instead of proper K). The layout people have clearly tried to up the quality by increasing the pixel density, but the graphics are disappointingly ugly due to this basic error. Moreover many charts are printed far too small, making text practically illegible, and certainly unpleasant to read. Many essays appear to have been thrown together from computer screen-based presentation raw materials, which just do not cut it in print.

I was hoping this book might look something like the truly "beautiful" Tufte books. No.

43 people found this helpful

Helpful

A Beautiful Collection on Visual Storytelling With Data

Reviewed in the United States on September 8, 2010

Like all of O'Reilly's Beautiful Series this collection offers an excellent overview of the subject matter it describes; it is carefully edited to provide smooth reading of insights of multiple experts on telling a clear simplifying visual story with data. These viewpoints, war stories and insights from multiple practitioners is as beautiful as any of Edward Tufte's works but provides more practical insight into the process of converting raw uninterpreted data on a complex problem into a computer generated visual story. Each of these data points and illustrations give new insight into the process of converting data complexity into a simplified and explanatory visual presentation. Insights into the process of exploiting software methods for showing this story are also given in sufficient depth something else that would not be gained from other Tuftean works on Information Design. The heavy coated stock and color corrected illustrations in this deceptively compact volume fully illustrate the variety and beauty of the authors visualization examples.

I found all of the illustrated chapters and differing expert viewpoints on visual storytelling with data extremely valuable. A slight nit I would have with this phenomenal work is that I would have placed Jessica Hagy's chapter entitled Visualization: Indexed derived from her blog on visual storytelling first because of its explanatory power. But, perhaps the editors felt that a different emphasis was appropriate in that this is an O'Reilly collection emphasizing Visual Storytelling with The Computer as the Preeminent Tool.

A Beautiful Coffee Table Book that will serve both scientists and graphic artists.

--Ira Laefsky
MSE/MBA

HCI and IT Consultant formerly on the Senior Staff of Arthur D. Little Inc. and Digital Equipment Corporation

11 people found this helpful

Helpful

Lu Anunciacao

A series of chapters tackling diverse topics of visualization

Reviewed in the United States on August 18, 2014

Verified Purchase

Visualization is the graphic presentation of data -- portrayals meant to reveal complex information at a glance. Think of the familiar map of the New York City subway system, or a diagram of the human brain. Successful visualizations are beautiful not only for their aesthetic design, but also for elegant layers of detail that

Helpful

Rachel Binx

An Excellent Survey of Data Visualization

Reviewed in the United States on February 15, 2011

This book provides an engaging and exciting tour through the field of data visualization. The authors have done a good job of finding data artists that are varied across their data sources, presentation styles, and professions.

I work with creating visualizations myself, and for the book was most useful in its demonstration of the creative process. Each chapter features a data artist and one particular piece of their work, chronicled from inspiration to final product. It offers a rare glimpse into the working mind of an artist, going through their various revisions and explaining what worked in each round, and the reasons for their creative decisions.

I recommend this book for anyone interested in visualizations, from the casual observer to professional data artist. I've found it immensely helpful as a source of inspiration.

5 people found this helpful

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T. Day

Very interesting

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 21, 2011

Verified Purchase

Some fascinating articles in this. I think know a fair bit about 3D graphics and scientific visualisation, but this book opened the door to a whole new infovis world, gives some major insight into how practitioners in that world operate, and prompted me to go off an experiment with some of the tools referenced. No printing problems with my copy, and the image detail seems fine to me. Don't expect a glossy, coffee table book; this is more like a collection of (very accessible) scientific papers.

3 people found this helpful

km

Poor print quality and its ironic that this book is in black and white and not color.

Reviewed in India on September 29, 2015

Verified Purchase

It is not worth buying the low cost Indian edition of this book in paperback edition. It is quite shocking to see a book on data visualization talking about the use of color and luminosity among various other aspects being printed in black and white.

The print quality is also well below acceptable levels for a book of this nature. While I dont expect something like the Edward Tufte books, I do expect images to be intelligible. A case in point is uploaded with the review - It is the underground map. You cannot make out any of the details from the map.

You are better off buying the kindle edition of this book and using the discount coupon from O'Reilly to convert it into a multi format electronic version of the book for about $9. I now have the kindle edition (which in color by the way) and also the pdf version which is also in color.

4 people found this helpful

Angus Lyon

content great, illustrations too small in current print format

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 2, 2012

Verified Purchase

very interesting content, but the book's illustrations were frustratingly small and the text on the illustrations was not legible even in bright daylight

3 people found this helpful

Jean Thibault

Not so beautiful

Reviewed in Canada on October 1, 2012

Verified Purchase

In one word: Disappointing.

This is actually a collection of small books, none of which would be worth printing on its own. The pictures aren't beautiful, and few of them are as intuitive or as easily interpreted as the authors think they are. I didn't find anything in here that I'd use.

Familien-Pappa-mit-Hirn-und-Herz

Pure Enttäuschung

Reviewed in Germany on January 17, 2011

Verified Purchase

Das Buch ist eine lieblose Sammlung von Beispielen aus der Historie und aktueller Themen. Für mich gehört bei einem Buch zur Visualisierung auch das Layout des Buches und das ist in diesem Fall schrecklich. Die Qualität der Grafiken reichen hier von hervorragend, über mittelmaß in viel zu niedriger Auflösung (50 dpi?) bis zu schlecht ausgeleuchteten Schnapschüssen. Ich kann auf jedenfall keinen Transfer für meine Arbeit ziehen. Der Untertitel "Theory in practice" wird dem Buch nicht gerecht. Es ist nur sehr begrenzt eine Anleitung für den Weg von den Daten zu einer ansprechenden Visualisierung...

Bei mir landet das Buch in den Papierkorb. Schade um's Geld.

21 people found this helpful

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