Choice of font
Tableau only has 12 fonts that are readable across all devices. If you want your viz to look the same on your windows browser as it does on a mac browser it is important to choose one of these. They are as follows:
- Arial
- Calibri
- Courier New
- Georgia
- Poppins
- Roboto
- Tableau
- Times New Roman
- Trebuchet MS
- Verdana
- Meryio UI
- Noto
If you don’t use one of these then your writing will not get lost but instead be defaulted to a familiar font on a different computer type.
Colour scheme
Less is more when it comes to colour (and a lot of other things when it comes to data visualisation)! While it may be tempting when you first start off in creating your viz to create a rainbow it really is more effective to strip it all back to basics. Too many colours will drag a readers attention in too many directions. If you have a number of variables in a multiple line graph think if it is better to just highlight just one of these lines or if you colour use a gradient of the same colour to get your point across in a stacked bar chart.
From a young age we are taught things such as green is good and red is bad. It is important to rethink this when we revisit these ideas now for a few reasons. Firstly, it is well known that a large number of people are colourblind in some way and these two colours are the most affected in the majority of people. If we use these colours we can subtract how many people can clearly see and understand our visualisations. Additionally, depending on the data type an increase or decrease may not be a good or bad thing, so it may be more useful to highlight either what has changed or only changes in one direction in a stand out colour.
Clashing colours can either be visually dissatisfying to the viewer or and sometimes can detract from the visibility of parts of the graph. The main combinations I would advise you to move away from are things in colours that are close to each other (e.g. dark grey & black, white & yellow) when choosing backgrounds and writing/ graph details.
Key facts and figures
You would hope when creating a viz that it is clear what the stand out messages are. If you are creating a viz about a particular historical event for example it may be useful to include a definition of what happened. Similarly, KPI’s are incredibly well conveyed when using BANs - the increased size will grab a viewers attention and may help to portray key findings at more of a glance. Think about trying to include a few of these in your next viz!
Consider your audience
A viz that is created for a specialist in a subject should look very different and be asking different questions to one that is introductory to a topic. Even a business viz created for different sectors of the business should have different takes on a data set. If you were to create a viz for a CEO the data and questions related to them should have different levels of insight to those that are created for department specialists. It is important to think of the questions you want to answer by creating your viz and if they are appropriate for the recipient of the viz.
