Gallery of Figures

This section is concerned with simplicity and its opposite – complexity. To make an effective and useful chart, a visualization should be the least complex one that faithfully portrays the data. In this section an approach to identifying complexity is explored and the results are used to provide an ordered list of all the figures in this book. Rather than the traditional combinations of titles and page references, this chapter provides a graphical thumbnail list of the figures. The figures are not ordered by their sequence in the book (which would be the natural default time-based ordering), but instead by an index of the grammatical complexity of the figure – a value relating to the size and complexity of the coordinate system, number of aesthetics, and presence of faceting. The simpler figures appear first, and the more complex ones later. This chapter is motivated by the belief that, to a great extent, the complexity of a visualization can be defined by the grammatical features of that visualization.