As you’ll learn in chapter 7, when I was about two years into my career as a product analyst, my boss sat me down in front of Tableau and said, “Make me a dashboard.” As I fumbled my way through the task, the idea of putting any effort into the design of the resulting group of charts didn’t once cross my mind. Even as I went on to make more reports for this boss and my stakeholders, I never gave any thought to my users’ needs beyond the data they wanted to see until about a year later when I attended my first Tableau conference. It was only then that I began to understand the need for good design, but I didn’t have the first clue about how to begin learning about this new world without going back to school, and there were extremely few resources at the time that were focused on designing with, and for, data. You, dear reader, are in luck: part 2 of this book is meant to be exactly that resource for you.
Chapter 4 delves deeply into the science of light and color as it applies to visualizing data, and then chapter 5 teaches you all about typography and how to style the text on the page to help guide your users’ eyes through your visualizations. Then in chapter 6, we examine the humblest of viz building blocks—the chart—as we learn what sets good charts apart from their less effective counterparts. Finally, you’ll get a crash course in interaction design in chapter 7, where you’ll learn how and when to use interactivity in your designs.