Original subtitles

A really important design principle is visual hierarchy, so

let's explore what it is we mean by visual hierarchy.

In this most excellent map that I just absolutely am super proud of and

think is amazing, sarcasm alert.

Okay, the [LAUGH], why am I telling you all this?

The point here is that one of the problems with this map, one of the many,

is that it has a poor visual hierarchy.

And what do we mean visual hierarchy?

What we're talking about is the relative importance of things on the map.

So just like if you're looking at the Mona Lisa, and

it should be obvious that you're meant to look at her face first and

get an idea of the information that's there about her expression or whatever,

when you look at a map like this, your brain is trying to say to itself,

what's important here, what am I supposed to focus on?

And so, when you do this, the fact that this area is this really super high

contrast certainly makes it stand out from everything around it,

so your eye is drawn to that, so in a way, that's a good thing.

But within the map itself, it all looks too bright, too contrasty, so you don't

know, am I supposed to be looking over here, over here, is it this part?

There is no kind of visual connection or contrast or information there.

It's just sort of this blah, it's just sort of all yelling at me at once.

And so, there's no indication of what's more or

less important within that mapped area.

Then, you also have things like the fact that this north arrow was too large.

So it's more important if you think of a size in being

in relation to importance on a map, so the larger something is on a map,

the more important your brain might think that it is.

And so, when it sees this really big symbol down on the corner here,

it thinks this must be important, and it's like, well, not really,

it's just telling you what direction it is.

Same thing with the scale is that it's too large so

it has too much visual importance, it's too high in the visual hierarchy.

In other words, when your brain is looking at this map it's going, okay,

there is this gigantic, awful looking thing in the middle, but

then I'm supposed to look at this or am I supposed to look at that?

Or maybe I'm supposed to go up there, or maybe I'm supposed to look at that, but

that's really too small, so the title is not clear.

You get the idea, I'm hoping,

is that there's not a clear sense of what's the subject of the map, and

what is the things that are just meant to be there in background if we need them.

This better version of the map, l hope, has a better visual hierarchy,

at least l think that it does.

The geographic area is certainly prominent,

it's in the center of the map, so

in terms of its location we're being told that that's the thing we should focus on.

And then it's higher contrast than the areas around it so

that helps us to know that we're supposed to focus on it.

This area, in the downtown especially,

is darker because it's a higher value, so that helps us focus on that part, and

we have a gradation of values from, say, here out to here, so that gradation

tells us that there's a hierarchy of higher values and lower values.

We have a nice prominent title here, so it's easy for

people to interpret that they should be looking at that, that that's important.

And then so on.

And so things like the scale and the legend are much smaller, so

they're less important, they're lower on the visual hierarchy.

And I actually made them a similar blue to the water so that they're there but

they're subtle.

So if somebody wants to know about that information there, it's there, but

it's not too big, it's not too bright,

it's not distracting people from what they're supposed to be looking at.

So this has a stronger or more well developed visual hierarchy in that it's

easy for somebody, whether they're thinking about it or not,

to know what it is that they're supposed to focus on and

what are the things they're not supposed to focus on.

Hierarchical organization is a way of visually indicating relative importance.

We're trying to show similarities, differences and relationships.

So what do I mean by that?

So, for example, if you are looking at a map with cities on it,

similarities might be the status of those in terms of capital cities.

You might have, say, Washington DC, and Ottawa is the capital of Canada, and so

they might be indicated with stars.

And what we're indicating there is that they are both capital cities,

they're national capitals, and so, we would have the same symbol for those.

Maybe we'd have a different signal for state or provincial capitals and

then another symbol for regular cities, another symbol for towns, another one for

villages.

And so we're trying to show people that if they have the same symbol there's

a similarity, they're in the same class, if they have different symbols there's

a difference between those and that that's obvious and there may be a relationship.

And so, it could be that it's like this different status in terms of a national

capital, a state or provincial capital, a smaller city, and so on,

and so that would be a relationship in relation to its status and to its size.

All right, we can do this in lots of different ways, but

it could be through colors or the thickness of lines.

There's lots of techniques for this and we'll talk about some of them, but

the main thing I want you to kind of take from this is that those are the things

we're looking for, similarities, differences, and relationships when

we're looking at somebody else's map or when we're designing our own.

For trying to establish visual hierarchy,

there's different ways that we can do that.

So, for example, here we have three different squares.

And [LAUGH] I know I use these really simple examples,

but I want them to be obvious.

I want you to kind of get what I'm saying really easily, right?

But there is more accurate than you think.

So, for example, what do we see about these?

All right, they're three different sizes.

So remember, we were just talking about similarities, differences, and

relationships.

So what's similar about these?

Well, they're the same shape and in the same color.

So that might be something we could use to our advantage.

So maybe they're all, I don't know, shopping malls, something like that.

So we're trying to indicate to somebody that these symbols represent

a particular class of data, okay?

What's the difference between them?

The only difference is the size.

So, maybe it's the number of customers that visit different shopping malls,

so we can indicate a difference between these based on just this one thing.

And by the way,

what we're talking about here are what we would call visual variables.

We can vary these things visually in order to communicate things.

So already we're talking about shape, size and color,

these are three visual variables that we can work with to try and

convey information in an efficient way, okay?

So here we've kept two of the variables constant, shape and color, and

we've only varied one of those with size.

Now, what I haven't said to you is which of these three would you use to represent

more customers in a shopping mall and

which would you use to indicate fewer customers.

Well, I'm hoping that it's fairly obvious that the small square would

represent a lower value and the larger square would represent a higher value.

Again, it may seem obvious, but a lot of times it may not be that clear when you're

making your own map, so you want to use that to your advantage.

People will naturally want to interpret something that way,

and so use the assumptions that they're making to make your map easier for

them to understand.

So we have a gradation here from low to high, so we're showing a relationship.

We already, just with this one simple example, have looked at similarities,

differences and relationships.

So, they're similar in terms of color and shape, they're different in terms of size,

and there's a relationship in terms of value from low to high.

See?

There's actually more there than you might have thought.

Here we're working with a different visual variable.

This is the saturation of the color or how much the color is sort

of a true blue versus one that has more white mixed in with it.

And, again, similarities, differences and relationships,

what's similar now is the size and the shape, what's being varied is the,

if you want to just think of it in general terms, color.

We'll talk about color definitions and components in another section, but for now

if you want to think of it like a lighter blue versus a darker blue, the same

thing's working here, that we can work with this to enhance our visual hierarchy.

We can even use something like a pattern or a texture to do the same thing.

And you'll notice that in all three of these cases we can work

with them to indicate something that's low, either with size or

a lighter shade or a more open grid versus high,

which is a larger square or a darker square or a more dense grid pattern.

So these, again, these are all things that are visual variables that can be used to

help people interpret the data in a way that you intend,

that you want them to see things a certain way, and

that's what helping to establish this idea of visual hierarchy.