Finding Beauty in Meaning

The data sits before me, neatly nestled to the left. The canvas before me is blank, just waiting. I drag over the row count. There’s a few thousand rows here, a mere sample of what is to come. I add a date and a shape begins to emerge. Time tells a story through arcs that mirror the bumps of a roller coaster. There’s a seasonality in this data I catch, a refrain that alters slightly with each arc.

I drag my mouse down, duplicating this sheet. From here, I glance over at the wall of metrics: what is here? My mouse pauses over one, its name not providing too much detail. It, too, joins the others in slicing the data. The curves become more jagged, the lines alluding to a new beat tucked into this data. I repeat this process – duplicating, dragging, sometimes removing or flipping the data around – dozens of times. The clock on my computer seems to lie. Surely, it hasn’t been a hour. No, it hasn’t been 2.

The charts pile up. There are fragments of information, alluding to a bigger piece. I finally hit the dashboard button, ensuring to draw my cursor down to floating, before I start dragging charts onto the page. They land in various spots, some on top of one another, while others I drag a bit further over. I start placing them, looking at how these abstract shapes interact. This chart, with the 4 bars, goes over to the left, while I shift this other chart towards the right. I shift them around until the blank spaces recede and the invisible lines that only I see flow correctly. Like a work from Mondrian, there is harmony within the chaos.

Slowly, charts begin to change, a bar chart becomes a treemap. A line gets altered, turning its untethered link shaded lightly below creating a subtle but beautiful area graph. One line gets pulled out more, while others are pushed back. Color slowly finds its way onto the dashboard. Headers start to fill in, icons cuing a hidden interaction, and text is progressively tuned. Should this header really be this large? Perhaps a bit smaller with a slightly different weight. Standing back, the work is complete.

Far enough away, the text is merely fuzz that softly lines the charts at regular intervals. The lines that only I can see are at rest. I hide all the sheets. Slowly, I rename them, mapping them to reading order. I name the actions, the sets, and start to tidy. Then I open the next blank sheet, ready to start anew.

I have done this work for over 10 years in Tableau. It’s easy to lose track, to fall into familiar rythms, and to let my body run from muscle memory. This flow came once too with interpreting. My hands knew just what to do, my body and face in time with their lead. I could watch another sign, hold in my mind the signs, and replay them again as I spoke, ensuring I wasn’t veering off their intent.

Flow is what this state commonly gets called. For analysis, though, it’s finding the balance between the design and message the charts want to relay. Kelly Martin summed this up elegantly with, “beauty is meaningful design.”

One way I find the flow in compositions is focusing on the lines – not the gridlines or other lines typically drawn with the data, but the ones created by the eye and mind from placement. Kelly had this technique mastered, both in visualizations, but also her house. It was a part of her, as it’s a part of me. It’s a game of freestyle poetry, of finding the lines while still holding the beat.

Sometimes, the reason a chart is there is for joy. Be blissful. Find your lines.