Studies have shown that readers will only spend 3 to 8 seconds looking at each plot in a report before deciding whether to invest more time examining that plot or to move on to the next part of the report. Hence as a data illustrator we need to design our plots very carefully so that within that very brief time window we have achieved the following aims:

• To highlight the key pattern that we want readers to take away from the plot (we should not expect readers to be able to identify this pattern for themselves, instead we need to do everything we can to make this pattern obvious to them)
• To motivate the reader to a “Call to Action” (if the reader simply learns something from a plot then that is of little value more than just entertaining the reader, instead we want to motivate the reader to perform a certain action or make a certain business decision as a result of that plot)
• Hopefully to motivate the reader to invest additional time and mental effort to discern what else they might be able to learn from that plot.

In this webinar we discuss the key elements involved in the production of high-quality data visualization.