Elegance Through Simplicity 2Elegance Through Simplicity 2

Visual Means to Highlight Data

In the original graph shown in Figure 1, the differing fonts and their sizes suggest distinctions in the data that don't really exist. For example, the huge font used for labeling the four quarters in the legend suggests that the quarters are somehow more important than the other data, but this clearly isn't the case. Making something bigger than the rest is a useful way to make it stand out as more important, so you must be careful to keep the sizes of similar components the same unless you really do want to emphasize them.

There are two fundamental means to visually highlight data: