Visual Thinking

The world is increasingly full of visually presented information in the form of maps, charts, diagrams, advertisements, movies, and web pages. New scientific disciplines, such as bioinformatics, often spawn dozens of new charting methods to cope with the explosive growth of new information. Stock market analysts use a wide range of charts and diagrams. Geographical Information Systems present information in graphical form to oceanographers and biologists, town planners and environmentalists. All these applications are visual thinking tools for helping people to come to grips with their data. Because the visual system is such a superb pattern finding engine, a visual display is often the best way of transmitting complex data to the human brain. Graphic displays literally help people think better. The act of discovery is in many cases synonymous with finding a pattern in the data. This book, grounded in the current science of human perception, is key to helping the creators of visual systems do their best work. The book is designed for designers, and has an emphasis on visual thinking as a process. It includes hundreds of illustrative examples and is very task-oriented, with how-to information and visual tasks, which complements the visual thinking process.