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Report Design Series

In these original white papers written for the Cognos Innovation Center for Performance Management, data visualization expert Stephen Few explores the rules of visual perception, how they affect our understanding of what we see, and the practical repercussions they bring about for business intelligence professionals.

Paper 1 of 3:
Visual Communication: Core Design Principles for Displaying Quantitative Information

This paper looks at research into the link between visual perception and understanding, and translates the findings into practical techniques that you can use to communicate more clearly with your data.

Paper 2 of 3:
Visual Pattern Recognition: Meaningful Patterns in Quantitative Business Information

This paper examines the data patterns and relationships common in most business reports (rank, part-to-whole, deviation, correlation, etc.) and provides practical guidelines for communicating these relationships effectively using points, lines, and bars. A richly illustrated and detailed work.

Paper 3 of 3:
Data Visualization: Past, Present, and Future

Spanning more than 2,000 years of recorded human history, this paper examines the birth and evolution of data visualization, from early Egyptian tables used to organize astronomical information through to bar charts, treemaps, and geo-spatial visualization tools (such as Google Earth).

Stephen Few has worked for over 20 years as an IT innovator, consultant, and educator. Today, as Principal of the consultancy Perceptual Edge, Stephen focuses on data visualization for analyzing and communicating quantitative business information. He provides consulting and training services, writes the monthly Visual Business Intelligence Newsletter, speaks frequently at conferences, and teaches in the MBA program at the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of two books: Show Me the Numbers: Designing Tables and Graphs to Enlighten and a new book entitled Information Dashboard Design: The Effective Visual Communication of Data.