Visualization Books

Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data
by Stephen Few

My Reference for Dashboard Design

If you were to listen to Dashboard software vendors then you'd think that information dashboards are built with speed dial, 3D pie-charts and bar-charts and nice background images. Of course what do these vendors know. In this book you will find examples for many industries of what a good information dashboard could be like. It really is a learn by example. But as you go through the book, you notice that the same graphics artifacts are used again and again. The author shows you to use the best artifacts for a given objective: sparklines, bar-charts, dot-plots and tables. You will also learn to make good use of your chart axis and borders so that they too can provide valuable information. I've not read dozens of books on the topic but this one is certainly one of the very good one. And of course, like many of the books in this section, it follows the Edward Tufte school of thought.

Show Me the Numbers
by Stephen Few

A Reference for Tables and Simple Charts

A complete book on tables, and simple graphs. Stephen Few seems to follow the same scarcity principles as Edward Tufte when it comes to "ink". Here the additional bonus is that the author compares many "good" yet subtly different charts so that you get a good intuitive feel for selecting the most appropriate one. He plays with contrasts, colors, type, alignement, column ordering and more. After reading this book, you will know how to make well designed tables and charts that can really make the numbers speak.

Visualizing Data
by William S. Cleveland

A real authority on the topic

This book will show you how to make your numbers speak. It describes a multitude of techniques to enhance the contrasts in your data so that the obvious stands out. One caveat: the outcome of the analysis is for analysts not managers. It would require further simplification to be presentable to management. The book is broken down into four major sections based on the number of relations that you wish to analyse. It starts with the simplest analysis based on univariate data. Then building on that Cleveland moves to bivariate and trivariate data. Finally, the last sections show ways to analyze multivariate and multiway data.

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
by Edward R. Tufte

Just Beautiful!

In this book Edward R. Tufte show us how we tend to over complicate things and how visual effects tend to distort the story that the numbers have to tell us. He introduces the concept of information to ink ratio is introduced, which is a fancy way of saying that each pixel on a chart should add information or help to it's comprehention. The book is also a beautiful collection of historical charts, whose authors intuitively knew the importance of un-cluttered information but to which Edward Tufte adds his personal touch to make them modern works of art. My personal favorites are the "Carte figurative", which shows the progress of the Napoleonic war and the one shown on the book cover, which represents a train schedule.

Envisioning Information
by Edward R. Tufte

Numbers Tell a Story

This book is about telling a story. Tufte has selected a collection of the most beautiful charts. He then presents each chart design and argues the qualities and defects in each and how sometimes small differences can be used to distort the numbers. If you were to buy a single Tufte book then I'd recommend his other book "Visual Display of Quantitative Information". But if you have a few bucks to spare then this is certainly a nice plus.

Creating More Effective Graphs
by Naomi B. Robbins

Concise and Practical

A little pocket book full of good ideas on how to get the most out of a chart or small graph. The author, like Tufte, is also an advocate of minimal clutter and dislikes pie charts. If you have read Tufte or "Show Me the Numbers" then this book probably won't add much to your knowledge. But if you don't want to spend too much and still want to have a condensed chart and graph guidelines book then this book is for you.

Information Graphics: A Comprehensive Illustrated Reference
by Robert L. Harris

An Encyclopedia of Charts

This book is a gem. It's really a dictionary of just about all of the types of charts that exist with the exception of interactive ones of course (we'll excuse the author though). If you have a problem and you think that some form of chart could help you then this book should contain the answer. Note that this isn't a book that you'd read from cover to cover.