The Extreme Presentation(tm) Method

Upcoming: Live, In-person Workshop

Hello, Friends and Colleagues,

We hope all is well.  Most of our workshops are for specific companies, so when we offer an Open Cohort, we like to let you know - to invite everyone.   Many of you have asked us to offer a live, in-person, open version of our Extreme Presentation workshop - and we are providing that.  Please see details below.  Reserve your spot here.  Express interest here.  Not sure, or have a question?  Ask us!

 

Details:

• Perhaps you have always wanted to take the workshop - now is your chance.
• Perhaps you attended the workshop, but would like to recommend it to a friend - feel free to introduce them to us.
• Rather than a full day - this live, in-person training will occur in a five-hour session - to make it easier for you to attend (see details above). 

Limited space available - first come, first served - we are intentionally capping the size of the workshop to ensure an interactive and integrated experience for you.
See the brochure and video here.

Download Extreme Presentation "Live, In-Person Open Cohort Workshop" Flyer

Great data visualization resource

I just came across a great data visualization website that I had not seen before.  Check out FlowingData, by Nathan Yau.  It is an active online community with lots of great visualization examples.

I particularly liked Nathan's choice for the best data visualization for 2008: Britain From Above (scroll down to #1), a fascinating series of videos tracking air, ground, and sea traffic in and around the UK using GPS data.  

Visualization Taxonomies

With the explosion of interest in information visualization, I find taxonomies of visualization approaches to be very useful in organizing knowledge and facilitating use of different visualization approaches.

The Periodic Table of Visualization Methods, hosted by the impressive Swiss Visual Literacy project, is the most comprehensive visualization taxonomy I have seen.  It divides visualizations into Data, Information, Concept, Strategy, Metaphor, and Compound Visualizations.  Each of these is then classified as a process or structure visualization, and further subdivided into whether they show detail, overview, or detail and overview, and whether they support convergent or divergent thinking. 

Dan Roam's Visual Thinking Codex, from his delightful book The Back of the Napkin, strikes an excellent balance between simplicity and comprehensiveness.  The Codex can be found on p. 141 of Dan's book.  With his permission, I have reproduced it here (although I highly recommend that you get a copy of the book).

Dan Roam
THE BACK OF THE NAPKIN
Copyright 2008 Portfolio
Available at www.Amazon.com 

The vertical axis is organized approximately around the intuitive structure of who/what/where etc., while the horizontal axis uses Dan's SQVID structure: a series of five contrasts that help you define the focus of your visualization: simple vs. elaborate, quality vs. quantity, vision vs. execution, individual attributes vs. comparison, and delta (change) vs. status quo.  

My own contribution to this is the Chart Chooser graphic, which some of you have seen.  (Which is also available in Japanese and Portuguese, courtesy of a couple of readers of this blog, and which the good folks at Juice Analytics turned into a small online application, available at www.ChartChooser.com) 

Stephen Few's Bullet Graphs

Stephen Few designed the Bullet Graph, a clean, effective way to display measurements vs. goals - particularly useful for marketing performance measures.

More on his blog, Visual Business Intelligence.

Great chart examples

A comment by Zach from Juice Analytics motivated me to post links to two great sites that show what an enormous variety of good chart options exist out there. The first is Michael Friendly's Gallery of Data Visualization, and the second is Kelly O'Day's www.processtrends site. I recommend both.