melsdata

About Me

Hi, I am Melanie and I’m currently studying at Western Sydney University undertaking a Bachelor’s in Visual Communication and specialising in Photo media and Digital Design.

Data Visualisation is an important skill in in order to enhance my learning in different aspects of design and how it can help me in my future career. What I’ve learned from this topic so far is that data visualisation is an important design in which helps contribute our everyday lives in understanding statistics by breaking them down visually – which is one of my many motivations for this area of design; to help others, make design in this field more appealing and attract to a broader audience.

Skills I am acquired in are Adobe programs such as:

Photoshop
Illustrator
inDesign
Premier Pro
external data program called Tableu.

About This Blog

This blog is about information based around data visualisation; all the internal and external factors that go into understanding what the topic is and how to make data. Throughout this blog there will be many topics under data visualisation what will help the audience understand this area more.

Week 1: What is Data Visualisation?

Data Visualisation involves the act of collecting statistics, research and evidence into a visual. A data visual should communicate attributes of perhaps the frequency and topic of the graph. They are basically the ‘modern equivalent of visual representation of data’.

Basically,
“Information that has been abstracted in some schematic form, including attributes or variables for the units of information”
as stated by Michael Friendly (2008).

Infographics vs. Data Visualisation:

“Not all information visualisations are based on data, but all data visualisations are information visualisations”
Quantitative labels
Processed visualisations are not data visualisations
The infographic process is way different from the opposing
All data visualisations are information visualisations
Design principle of graphics are different
Data visualisations are based on real sourced statistical information e.g. ABS
Infographics are more image based to get the point of the information across to the reader whereas data visualisation is often more graphic based

Reflection:
The insight that I have gained from learning about data visualisation is that it is a whole different entity from what I am used to- infographics. There is still a lot to learn about this topic as it requires a lot of meticulous details in data processing and to effectively portray this data source.