-: All right, so I've mentioned redundancy once
or twice also, but I want
to say a couple more things about it.
First of all, titles matter.
I've shown you this before, we've talked about it before.
Say something with your title
that says something about your data.
The chart may show me 80%
of people love strawberry ice cream or whatever it is,
but if the title says, "Ice Cream Survey Results",
I'm less likely to remember it.
Simply say 80% of people love ice cream
and then the chart says it again
that's redundancy technically, but you know what?
It helps.
So title things appropriately.
Now, on top of that here we have a chart, France, $717,
Norway, $608 whatever that's about.
I have no idea what that's about.
Who cares?
Long story short I could use redundancy
to help you remember which is which.
Oh, right.
France is the larger bar
if I'm familiar with national maps.
If not maybe that doesn't help, good debate
to have around that.
I could even make it more redundant
by reinforcing the color even more.
Now, in this particular case, I have two maps
that actually use the same color schemes.
So you have to decide France is blue
and actually France does use blue more heavily.
And Norway is first of all, majority red, their map
or their flag rather.
Do I keep saying map?
I mean flags.
On top of that France has the blue, fleur-de-lis,
et cetera, et cetera.
So this is a logical choice.
But if you had two countries
with the same map color as France or the United States,
which one gets which or Norway and the United States, right?
You make a decision, you run with it.
Once I'm primed, remember we talked
about attentive processing.
Once I'm primed to know, blue is France, I'll be good.
I'll pick that up throughout the entire presentation.
And by the way, if you're doing a presentation
and you're using this information again
and again and again, 'cause you're gonna show me France
a hundred times it better stay blue.
Once you teach me that that's blue,
it better remain that way.
Last example of redundancy that I'd like to share
this is a great data story that came
from Scientific American looking at their 175 years
which was a year or two ago, 175 years
in this publication's life.
They looked at all the entire magazine's text
and they essentially were looking
for keyword words used in the magazine over time.
So for instance, the word paper the peak of its usage was
in 1840 something and it's just gone down and down and down.
Scientific American doesn't mention paper very much anymore.
The word require going down and down and down
but then it shot up at some point for some reason
and then it came down, down, down.
So certain words have different patterns.
You might expect more modern words.
Let me see if I can find one here.
Look at this word.
Invention.
Whoops, sorry.
Invention, pretty popular and then crashes.
And then we never talk about invention again.
Why?
I don't know what replaced it, but it's interesting.
Other words, like I'm sure there are words
that are scientific terms that were unknown back
in the day that became more popular over time.
But long story short, the reason I bring this
up now is this, look at this.
We have colors representing decades
and it's a lot of colors.
It's hard to pull off a pallet that actually works
with this many colors in it.
It's hard for us to differentiate between different colors.
And we also have a timeline.
I can see the time is flowing left to right years down here.
So I can see the current year labeled.
Oh, nice, do less, right?
They don't bother labeling every single year
although these little dots help me track
decades or whatever.
But long story short, it's redundant.
I can see this in 1917.
Do I need the color to help me?
No.
But by the same token as I scroll through this,
I can easily see, oh look this is like the 1930s
or the yellow bar, the bits.
So it helps me sort of track visually very quickly,
pre-tentatively where I am in time.
So it's redundant, it's not required, but it's kind of nice.
Speaking of which redundancy and kind of nice,
look at the design.
The line is actually a gradient of color,
a little bit thicker, bolder line.
And do they need to fill it in with the color underneath?
No.
But it gives me more visual space to detect the color.
If it was just the line, it might be hard to see.
And the fact that it sort of fades out, it's a gradient,
this is just beautiful.
And even by the way I have to probably zoom in
to see it maybe a little bit.
There's the line and then there's a very subtle white line
essentially spacing between the data line
and then that gradient of color.
Subtle little design decision that just makes it prettier.
Okay, so redundancy very, very important.