techniques of visualisation

"A picture is worth a thousand words". This expression says a lot about the power of visualisation.

Visualisation helps in facilitating communication, it supports in easily remembering things, ...

A beautiful example of the power of visualisation can be found in advertising: considering all the advertisements that are all around us, one cannot deny that visualisation IS a powerful mean to deliver a message.

Also in the problem-solving area visualisation is often brought up. McKinsey says e.g. "make a chart every day". I.e. the visualisation stimulates the thinking process. This counts especially for visual oriented people.

Below I describe techniques (and tools) one can use to visualise things. The article guides you when you want to include a good "eye-catcher" for your article, a tutorial, ... .

Feel free to comment when you do have additional thoughts (via comments at the bottom). Any feedback is highly appreciated.

Several sorts of visualisation exists. The best technique to use mainly depends on the data or information that needs to be transported.

1. raw data: e.g. visualising monthly financial figures
2. concept
3. process: e.g. visualising steps to fulfill an online transaction
4. feeling: e.g. visualising happiness

Using a photo is the more artistic way to visualize your message and works particularly well for visualising feelings, spheres, ... .

For inspiration one can consult the several photo sharing sites: Flickr, Google images, ... .

A tool like Cooliris can also turn handy to quickly select your envisioned image.

Note: Always pay attention to 'Copyrighted work'. Several licenses exist, every license has his own peculiarities what you may or may not do with the photo.
E.g. these photo's were retrieved via the Google Image Search with option 'labelled for reuse'.

Tools like Microsoft Visio and OpenOffice Draw are excellent tools to draw out concepts and processes.

The SmartArt functionality of Excel is also a quick and intuitive way to construct some appealing graphs.

Using the mind-mapping technique, the focus lays mainly on concepts and their relations. One can compare it with how associations are made in our brains.

Tools like FreeMind and XMind are great tools to start with.

Spreadsheet tools typically come -apart from the core calculation module- with graphical functionalities.

Especially for representing raw data these tools shine.

TIP: did you know Google Chart Tools ! It's ideal to visualise data and integrate it on your website.
A great thing is by just parameterizing an url, one can construct the wanted graphs. Take e.g. this url: http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chs=300x225&cht=v&chco=FF6342,ADDE63,63C6DE&chd=t:100,80,60,30,30,30,10&chdl=A|B|C .
Pasting it into a browser will pop-up a 'color pallet' chart.

If your data is structured in a node-oriented way (e.g. XML files), one can utilise Graph Editors. A nice tool for this is yEd.

If you want to group some related words nicely together, one can use the 'word clouds' technique. E.g. one can do this via wordle.

Giving a presentation intrinsically has a big visualisation factor in it.

Apart from the classical presentation and slide software like MS Powerpoint or OpenOffice Impress which belong to the linear presentation tools, a new tendency is to use non-linear presentation tools. A nice tool to do this is Prezi.

On the 'idea spreading website TED' Prezi is used for some of the presentations. E.g. this one about the power of smiling ;-) .

This new way of presenting gives the visualisation dimension an even more importance. One can zoom in and out, focus on specific topics, ... .

Another nice technique of presenting is Pecha Kucha, it originates from Japan. The idea is to show just 20 slides where each slide has a duration of only 20 seconds. Hereby only pictures are used. It's ideal to show a great idea in a limited time.

When techniques above do not fulfill your needs. I recommend you to have a look at Flowing Data. The author Nathan did a great job in showing the possibilities of data visualisation. In the tutorials one can learn how to do it yourself. Mostly the free software R is used therefore.

Also take a look at visualcomplexity. This site brings together several projects that envision to visualize complex topics.

Have fun.

Feel free to comment when you do have additional thoughts. Any feedback is highly appreciated.