Micro Visualizations : Data-driven typography and graphical text enhancement

At the intersection of information visualization and typography lies the design space of micro visualization, a family of basic techniques enriching text in regard of its accessibility, comprehensibility, and memorability. We propose a taxonomy that differentiates specific types of visualizations applied to text design and layout. We elaborate two main approaches to aligning the visual appearance of a text and its content. The first explores the addition of graphical elements embedded into or adjacent to a text, while the other approach explores the visual modification of a text by means of typographic visualization. For this we evaluate how different techniques can be used as visual variables.