-: All right. Hey everybody.
So we talked a little bit about labeling
and annotations before.
I wanna just circle back to it a little bit.
I'm gonna point you all to this article again.
We reviewed this briefly
during the maps module, module four.
I would encourage you to go back through this article
if you haven't gone through it
go through it for the first time.
Really look at how serious a job, how focused the concept
of labeling really is in cartography, yes.
But the same things apply
to data visualization and all the rest of it.
So, you know, read through this article.
You know, like I said, this is, covers a lot of ground.
This is also outdated
so it's not like everything you'll see
in this article is still actually how it is
in Google Maps and or Apple Maps.
But you'll learn a lot about typography, labeling,
how to really emphasize things and bring things to life.
A lot of subtlety and nuance in this article
that is really a good learning experience.
So definitely check it out. Enough said.
This is a great data story that I love to point to
when thinking about labeling and annotations.
This is someone I actually know
created this visualizing MBTA data, right?
The MBTA, the train system here in,
well transportation system here in the Boston area.
And this was done a few years ago, 2014,
so quite a while back now.
And what I love about it, first of all,
very interesting data visualization, very creatively done
but everywhere along the way
very thoughtfully labeled and annotated data visualizations.
So for instance, as we're going through
we get this first visualization over here
where we see the MBTA system
whatever's going on in this visualization.
One nice thing is that even the labels
they're not just labels or in this case
they're not even really labels, they're inline text
but they're all interactive.
Anytime I hover over anything, it makes all the stuff
that isn't that disappear.
So very thoughtfully done.
And that's a feature throughout this entire experience.
But what we're looking at over here is a very
complex visualization of trains.
It's actually based on, I can't remember the guy's name
but a way of displaying train timetables
and the locations of trains over time.
And you're supposed to sort of track these lines.
And essentially this is a way of discovering
when you have trains that are running late
or running into problems etc.
And it's not something you can easily decode on your own.
Therefore, really good idea to have these little annotations
to the side explaining to you what's going on here.
Right here, we can see that there's an afternoon
rush hour beginning, and the lines get sort of denser
I think is the point.
And here a disabled train occurs,
and so it doesn't sort of finish its route.
And by the way, like I said, hover over that thing
and I can see the actual line there that's relevant.
Long story short
great annotations to explain things along the way.
To help me understand what the heck
I'm supposed to do with this data.
Good labeling, subtle typography decisions,
like this is in gray,
these are darker sort of drawing attention to these.
But this is there for your reference point.
Nice header is a bigger boulder typography.
Most of the body copy is fairly similar size
and that's okay, but great labeling
and annotation throughout this data story.
So definitely feel free to check this one out.
It's still up there on GitHub.
But you know, a lot of different type sizes being used here.
A lot of different type colors to help you understand
remember the words, right?
Information hierarchy.
The information hierarchy is clear throughout this piece.
All right, Typography.
I've already started talking about it.
Typography is really important.
Like I said, you can think of it mostly
being just about type size.
I'm not even gonna suggest you think too much
about font selection, although I will say this,
a lot of people, if you want to go beyond one font
which you absolutely can do, at a minimum
what you can do is to say, all right,
I'm gonna use two fonts and everything I create
I usually use two fonts.
One is a Serif font.
So Serifs are when you have these little extra
little things sort of hanging off the edges of the letters.
A sans Serif font is something like Arial
where the letters are just simpler, visually.
When you mix Serif and sans Serif fonts
you can use one for like the headers
and then the other for like body copy.
That's a good strategy.
So feel free to do that.
On top of that, yes, it's about font size.
Important stuff is big.
Less important stuff is small, right?
That's easy.
But it's also about font weight, right?
This is bold, this is semi bold, this is regular.
It's also about font color.
We have black fonts, we have gray fonts, right?
So use color, weight and even the font type with, you know,
within intention, same word, right?
There's a great book, The Big Book of Dashboards,
Steve Wexler and a couple of other guys who I know
two of the three, these three guys wrote this book.
It's all about dashboards and they sort of show examples
of dashboards and what makes them work well
and or less well.
You know, good collection of dashboards,
sort of good inspiration to help you
do better dashboard design which is nice.
But what one of the examples I like to point to
when we talk about this typography is this dashboard.
You know, we have mostly texts here.
It's not like rich with, you know,
a thousand visualizations.
There's a lot of text on the screen.
The visualizations are pretty simple.
And what I like about this from a typography standpoint
is you have five to eight, and I'm just sort of guessing
by looking, different font sizes.
Three different colors for the typography.
One font family
they didn't even bother doing more than one.
It's all title case also, which is another thing
you can do by the way, to differentiate your fonts.
They could have made all the headers
or maybe like those sub-headers
students, enrollments, classes, whatever, all caps, right?
So think about those strategies, all caps, title case,
color, font weight, font size.
You have all this variety of decisions you can make
to make sure that information hierarchy
really comes through.
Say you have two things that they're pretty similar
but this is different from this
but you're gonna use the same font size
cause they're equally important
but you want them to be differentiatable.
And you don't wanna use color maybe
because there's too much color going on on the screen, fine.
Excuse me, maybe one's all caps and one's title case.
Be thoughtful, be intentional with your typography
and overall with your labeling and annotations.