The Visualize Thing

My job entails doing a lot of writing, an activity which often now shifts to figuring out how to condense a page of prose to a short paragraph and some sort of graphic. I regularly pray to Tufte, of course. But yesterday I was excited to see (on Boing Boing) the "Periodic Table of Visualization Methods," an excellent and useful summary of the wide variety of means to graphically depict information. The table categorizes the methods in three ways (whether they represent process or structure, whether they provide details or overviews, and whether they permit convergent or divergent thinking), but also includes an example of each method in use. If you use or want to use graphics more effectively, check out the table and the hosting site, Visual-Literacy.org.