Qualities of great visualizations

Lecture 02

Dr. Benjamin Soltoff

Cornell University
INFO 3312/5312 - Fall 2026

August 27, 2026

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  • Homework 01

The image depicts a bar chart titled 'Bipartisan Parton,' illustrating the percentage of Democratic and Republican affiliated Americans who hold a favorable opinion of various public figures. The chart consists of bar segments representing Democrats and Republicans. Each bar reflects the percentage of respondents who view each person favorably. Dolly Parton shows the highest bipartisan approval with 78% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans. All the other individuals show polarized attitudes (Donald Trump has 77% approval by Republicans but only 3% for Democrats, Barack Obama 90% approval from Democrats and 14% from Republicans). The only other outlier is Mark Zuckerberg with extraordinarily low support from both Democrats and Republicans, 8% and 13% respectively. The source of the data is cited as UMass Lowell/YouGov from March 2026.

Image credit: u/Spicer2

Learning objectives

  • Define Cairo’s five qualities of great visualizations
  • Discuss the importance of truth in visualizing data
  • Evaluate the effectiveness of a chart’s design based on these qualities

The five qualities of great visualizations

Great visualizations are

  • Truthful
  • Functional
  • Beautiful
  • Insightful
  • Enlightening

Source: Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art

Truthful visualizations

  • Truth is a continuum
  • Avoid self-deception
  • Be honest with your audience

Truncated axes

Image credit: How Charts Lie

Functional visualizations

  • Choose graphic forms according to the tasks you wish to enable
  • What is the purpose of the visualization?
  • Who is the intended audience?

Obesity and poverty in the United States

Population in the United States

Adjusted for population

Scatterplot

Beautiful visualizations

A measure of the emotional experience of awe, wonder, pleasure, or mere surprise that those objects may unleash

  • People prefer to look at aesthetically pleasing things
  • Beauty is subjective, but still exists

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Image credit: Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams by Nigel Holmes

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Image credit: Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams by Nigel Holmes

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Image credit: Charted: Median House Prices vs. Income in the U.S.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

Insightful visualizations

Good visualizations clear the path to making valuable discoveries that would be inaccessible if the information were presented in a different way

  • Spontaneous insight vs. knowledge-building
  • Know your story and audience

Not insightful

Image credit: xkcd

Hockey stick chart

Image credit: IPCC and Michael Mann/Penn State

Warming stripes

Adapted from #ShowYourStripes and hockeystick::warming_stripes()

Enlightening visualizations

Do good with data

  • Not all topics are equally important
  • Elevate socially relevant topics

Image credit: u/DavidWaldron

Image credit: u/mattsmithetc

Application exercise

Critique a visualization

Instructions

Work in teams of 2-3 students

  • Critique your assigned visualization with respect to the five qualities of great visualizations
  • Identify three specific design choices you would make to improve the visualization on one or more of the five qualities

Wrap up

Recap

  • Pursue truth in your visualizations
  • Make your visualizations functional for the intended audience
  • People like to look at pretty things - make your visualizations aesthetically pleasing
  • Insightful visualizations help people make discoveries
  • Use data for good