Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 03 at (Canvas Link)
Readings
This week’s readings have two distinct parts.
Part 1 is connected to the “Design School” (posting coming). While a little bit of reading is not going to make you a designer, it can begin the process of getting you to improve. And it will give you something to practice. I really like these basic lessons of 4 basic principles from Robin Williams’ Non-Designer’s Design Book. These 4 brief chapters (and a summary chapter) will give you the idea of the CARP principles (contrast, alignment, repetition, proximity). People who are good designers (and teach design) tell me this is a great place to start. I feel that learning this has helped me (and generations of students seem to agree). Yes, this is 5 chapters, but they are really short (a few pages each).
- Proximity (Chapter 2 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter2.pdf 4.8 mb)
- Alignment (Chapter 3 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book) (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter3.pdf 4.3 mb)
- Repetition (Chapter 4 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book) File (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter4.pdf 3.5 mb)
- Contrast (Chapter 5 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book) File (TheNonDesignersDesignBookChapter5.pdf 4.3 mb)
- Summary: The Four Basic Principles (Chapter 6 of The Non-Designer’s Design Book) (6-Overview.pdf 948 kb)
Part 2 is in honor of the fact that I am out of town this week at the IEEE Visualization conference – the main conference in the field. I want you to have a sense of what visualization research is nowadays. What I’d like you to do is…
Look at the titles of the papers from this year’s conference. Notice that there are 3 separate sub-conferences (VAST, InfoVis, and SciVis). From looking at the titles, you can hopefully get a sense of what the topics are. There are 25 second video previes, and links so you can get the actual papers (via the IEEE digital library).
- 2017 Session List is organized in the order of presentation, but it has links to the “video previews” (25 seconds) that have the abstracts on the pages. The DOI links will take you to the digital library. The 2017 Official Papers List is easier to read, but lacks the links.
- Unofficial Papers Lists (with links to PDFs)
You are not required to read any papers. But, I would like you to look at at least some of the abstracts to papers whose titles you find intriguing (things that you might be interested in enough to want to read), or at least watch a few of the videos (the videos are often not very good).
Optional
Part 1: It’s not hard to find things to read about design. But, if you want a little more than the first 4 principles from Williams, I think that these Chapters from Kadavy’s Design for Hackers give a nice presentation of some other basic design principles that are really hard to describe.
- Composition and Design Principles (Chapter 6 of Design for Hackers) (DesignForHackers6-CompositionAndDesignPrinciples.pdf 3.8 mb)
- Visual Hierarchy (Chapter 7 of Design for Hackers) (DesignForHackers7-VisualHierarchy.pdf 2.2 mb)
Part 2: I wasn’t going to ask you to read papers, since there’s a lot going on in class already. But to truly get a sense of what research in Vis is like, you should actually read some papers. Starting with the best (e.g., the award winners) is a good start. I’ve tried to pick representatives of different kinds of papers.
- Danielle Albers Szafir. “Modeling Color Difference for Visualization Design.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018. In the Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE VIS Conference. (best paper award winner).
This year’s best paper award is an empirical paper about Color. Danielle (Dr. Color) Szafir was a recent Ph. D. graduate from Wisconsin who worked with me.
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Arvind Satyanarayan, Dominik Moritz, Kanit Wongsuphasawat, Jeffrey Heer. “Vega-Lite: A Grammar of Interactive Graphics” IEEE Trans. Visualization & Comp. Graphics (Proc. InfoVis ’16), 2017
Last year’s best paper award winner is more of a systems paper that talks about how to build visualizations (and presents a rather interesting toolkit for doing it).
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Michael Gleicher. “Considerations for Visualizing Comparisons.” IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics, 2018. In the Proceedings of the 2017 IEEE VIS Conference.
OK, not an award winner, but it’s a convenient example of a “theory/model” paper. And I think it’s good.
Online Discussion
Initial Posting Due: Tue, Oct 03 at (Canvas Link)
This week, there are two separate kinds of readings, so there are two separate discussion topics. Make an initial post about each. We’ll use one discussion for both topics.
- From your scan of papers at the Vis conference… List 3-5 papers that sound intriguing. Say something about why you think they might be interesting. (Do not pick any of the papers listed under optional reading). Are there any particular themes you see across the papers that you find interesting or unexpected?
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From your readings for design school… Pick one or two of the design principles (even better if you pick one from an optional reading). Discuss how this principle might be applied in some of the things you do (not just making visualizations). Pick an example from the world that shows how this principle is applied well. For example, I might talk about how a principle applies to how I prepare slides for class. I might pick a slide from someone who’s a good designer and describe how the principle applies in it.
If you’re looking for something to discuss, you can discuss what topics from the Vis conference look interesting (or not), or point out how the design principles can be seen in all of the designed objects around you.
