Short Description

The design and implementation of static figures across all phases of data analysis, from ingest and cleaning to description and inference. How to make principled and effective choices with respect to marks, spatial arrangement, and colour.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of the course, students are expected to be able to:

  1. Analyze existing static visual encodings in terms of marks and channels, spatial arrangement, and color broken down into luminance, saturation, and hue.
  2. Design new static visual encodings that use space and color channels appropriately according to principles of perceptual effectiveness and by matching channel type to attribute type for quantitative versus categorical attributes.
  3. Implement static visual encodings using existing toolkits and libraries.
  4. Describe and manipulate table, network, and spatial data; transform data into a form suitable for the intended abstract task of the visualization user.
  5. Explain whether a visual encoding is perceptually appropriate for a specific combination of task and data.

Reference Material

  • Munzner, Tamara. Visualization Analysis and Design, CRC Press, 2014.

Instructor (2016-2017)

Note: information on this page is preliminary and subject to change.