[MUSIC] This lesson is around aesthetics. And the idea behind this is that yeah, we want to make it have all of these important features such as pre-attentive. We want to make it nice and usable. We want to make it uncluttered, we want to make sure that there is not too much cognitive load. We want to make sure that you're using at least one of the Goshal principles. But also, we want to make it look nice. And I think that's very important, that the visualization looks nice. But by looking nice I don't mean you have to be this artist whose painting this very fancy visualization that you don't want to touch. It's just something you want to admire. No, on the contrary you want to bring in aesthetics because you want to draw the reader to it. In this lesson we're going to view some examples that demonstrate strategic use of color, alignment, and the use of white space in data visualizations. As I said before, your visualizations don't have to be artistic. It just has to have a certain aesthetic to be an aesthetic visualization it needs three fundamental components, color, alignment, and leveraging of white space. So the first is color and we've talk a lot about color but you should used color very intentionally. That is color should be use very strategically and sparingly to highlight what you want the audience to see in your visual. Next you want to be able to ensure that the alignment is how you want it, so you need to pay very careful attention to the alignment of the different elements of your visualization on the page to ensure that there there is a clean and vertical and horizontal lines. You don't want the alignment to be off because that is where people are going to focus on. It's a distraction and then you are going to lose that important reattentive attribute piece. Finally and something actually I haven't talked much about yet is about leveraging white space. You don't want to make it so that the visual takes up all of the room. What you want to do is strategically use white space to be able to differentiate aspects of the visuals and as way to focus to attention and keep things looking uncluttered. So white space is something that really comes into play in aesthetics. White space is often misused. So what happens is that there may be too much or too little space between titles and data, so it's difficult to be able to draw your eyes' and brain's attention to what you really need. And so it's really very artistic and it's difficult to be able to illustrate because I think there is some flare and artistic license that you need to be able to use to be able to emphasize what you need while also providing all of the information in the space that you have. So it's really something that you have to keep playing with and tweaking until you are comfortable with how much white space you are using. It's a crucial to aesthetics but of course it's tricky to be able to give you cut and dry ways of thinking about it. So as I just said when we talk about aesthetics in general it's very subjective and it's hard to say okay I can show you this. Let me show you and like visuals that have a certain aesthetic element to it, and we should just discuss it and this is something you should really think about. What is it about a particular visual that makes it a good visual for the specific of our examples? So let me start with the first one. Our first visual is an example of a line graph. And the idea is that we want to be able to see how we are doing today versus last year. And whether we'll be able to meet some sort of goal. And I think that this you can see here is an example of it. And so one thing I want you to think about as you're looking at this and maybe applying it to your own visualization is what is it about this visual that allows the reader to get the information that they need but also has the aesthetic quality to it that is recommended by many of the top visualization designers in the world today. Okay, so moving to the next example. Here is a horizontal stack bar, which is my favorite type of visual. Because I just find it to be so easy to understand for everyone. And here is something from my field in economics. I know a fair bit about this information. Which is a survey about the priorities in development from a development agency. What we can see here is that there is a certain aesthetic that the user has in place here to be able to allow the audience to get a sense of what are the most important things. What should be the priority based on the survey results? In this case, it's very clear. You look at it, and it's like boom education, agriculture, rural development, and poverty reduction, those are the three most important. But the other stuff are important too, and we're going to show those but we're going to put those a little bit in the background. And that's something that I've talked about before. The reason I find that this particular model of visual is so effective is that it allows the reader to spend just a second to be able to say this is important, I know because it's in blue. The title is in blue, the top three are in blue, the bars are in blue. What are the priorities based on the survey results? This is exactly the type of thing we should see when we're doing visuals for an audience whether it's a PowerPoint to 500 people, whether it's 10 people on the conference room or whether it's to a colleague down the hall. In other words this is a type of thing that audience can just quickly pick up out of blue and say okay well I'm interested other things, but let's just take a look here. Yeah, I see there's something I'm interested in, like basic infrastructure's only 8%. That's interesting, so maybe I'm still going to tackle this, but I'm going to have to marshal other evidence to show that we need to be tackling basic infrastructure. And so it makes it easy for us to say, okay, well, the survey results say education, ag and rural development, and poverty reduction's are the biggest. So maybe that's what we should go with. And so we're really telling a story, right? As we're going to go over in course four, we're going to be talking about stories, in virtually the whole course. We're telling the story here of what the survey results that we need to know are. And what we prioritize in the future and it's very simple. And so with that thank you for joining me here in module three, see you in module four when Hunter is going to talk about a more high level look at these things.