I came across a post from a year ago on Alli Torban’s blog, Data Viz Today, which had an interesting idea. In her post she says,

There are so many decisions to make in the design process, and many times we aren’t even aware that we’re making a decision, like leaving default colors or not aligning text elements.

Open your eyes to those decisions and take notice of what professionals are doing by physically marking those decisions on the charts and maps.

So when I’m done reading the paper and enjoying all the graphics, I’ve started to take a red sharpie and circle important elements (title, subtitle, legend, labels) and specific design choices (bolding certain text, coloring/outlining certain elements, etc).

I really like this idea of not just passively taking in the graphics we are confronted with, but actively identifying key decisions the data viz designer/analyst is making. I gave this a try with last week’s newspaper in a viz comparing quarterbacks, namely Tom Brady and Aaron Rogers.

While I can’t do this with every visualization I come across, I do think it’s a good exercise to conduct every now and again, helping bring all the components that go into viz to the forefront.