Ware: Visual Thinking for Information Design

This is a thin little book (I know several people who read it in one sitting) that discusses the psychology of visual perception and its relationship to visualization and design. It’s not very deep, but it’s a great place to get started in appreciating how understanding how we see can help us be better designers.

This is a thin little book that will give you some of the elements of how the human visual system works, well contextualized with how that influences visual design and visualization. It is concise and generally well thought out. It doesn’t take the place of a more thorough introduction to perception, or a more thorough discussion of visualization, or even a touch into the research that connects perception to visualization. But it’s a great starting point. It provides a lot of the intuitions.

I think this book is a great place to start for thinking about how perception influences visualization. I use it as a starting point in class.

Note: there is a 2022 revision of the book (the title changed subtly). We will use it in my class in 2024 and beyond. I haven’t re-read it, but it looks like it is even better.

UW Students: The (UW Library Page) provides access to the entire book.