The Art of Insight [Book Review]
Book cover of The Art of Insight
The Art of Insight: How Great Visualization Designers Think by Alberto Cario is a book that invites you think deeply about visualizations that you see everyday, that you create or that just flow by you in your daily activity.
The book is structured into four parts: Pragmatists, Eccentrics, Ambassadors and Narrators. As these titles already suggest this is an interview style book. Each chapter is an interview with one person that creates visualizations for a living. The great thing about the style of this book that it doesn’t just print the interview verbatim but rather summarizes them, adds insights & reflections and the includes direct quotes to emphasize points more directly. Of course all of the chapters are accompanied by beautiful visuals, from simple visualizations to stunning pieces of art.
My eyes have been opened to the spectrum of possibilities when it comes to visualizations. Every chart type and variation has its place, yes even the pie chart, but make sure that it fits the story, you prepare readers and have a good reason for using it.
The amount of interview data journalists in this book isn’t surprising considering Alberto Cario’s background, but it was definitely interesting to see just how much thought goes into it and he recommends a lot of sources to check out to find interesting data journalists pieces. Which is something that I have now put on my list of sources to keep an eye out for.
The key takeaway for me is definitely to be more creative with my visuals, reason through things and then iterating on the designs. In the epilogue Cario shares his general approach to work through visualizations: Scaffolding > Encoding > Arrangements within the visualization > Annotations > Layout > Visual design and style and > Dynamics. As always these things aren’t written in stone but are good general guidelines when building visuals.
In closing I highly recommend you check out this book if you are interested in stepping up your own thought process around designing visualizations, but don’t expect a play-by-play solutions brief on how to do it.
