Consistent. Clear. Engaging - Data Visualisations Style guide; an Introduction

For almost every single company, branding is super important. 

Of the below, how many can you recognise, just from the colour scheme, font, logo or layout?

(For reference, Apple, Ralph Lauren, McDonalds, PlayStation)
These are some of the most marketable brands, and they rely on small visual cues, colours and associations within our (the consumer's) mind to ensure that we think and recognise their individual brand. For instance, if the M was a different font, would you recognise it? If the poignant buttons on the PlayStation controller weren't coloured, how much longer would it take to know that it's an advert for the console?

What does this mean?

In many large organisations today, there are countless training sessions, internal documentation and, given we're now in an age of information tech, a whole host of plugins.
The idea for this blog series came when I was with a client, and noted that they had countless templates, shortcuts and 'best practices' when it came to presentation design - that is, in MS PowerPoint.

Given a lot of the employees at this firm consistently churn out slide deck after slide deck, as I had during my placement year, the notion that this sort of practice is almost exclusive to the Microsoft Office stack struck me. What's also interesting, is that if you do want some level of branding or best practice, the "common" way of doing so would be to either design a bespoke application for your colleagues to use - which means yet MORE training, another IT tool to add to the existing array etc.

In this vein, one of my tasks at this client was to help to develop best practices & help develop something which represented their corporate brand - on the same level their PowerPoint style guide was doing.

The Objective

In this blog series, I will look to explore and outline some steps to consider and take when thinking of & creating a corporate style guide for data visualisation. A lot of the examples I will talk through and show will be based on Tableau, but there's no reason why best practice and ideas cannot be a cross-platform process.

The plan is to cover;

- Chart & Visualisation types

- Colour

- Iconography

- Typography

- Layouts & Templates

This will cover most parts of the key features in a data visualisation style guide, but it always depends on the structure & branding of your own firm to decide which apply to you.

A good way to look at style guides for visualisation is like a cookbook - by all means, the user of the guide can imitate pixel for pixel, but there is of course creative license. This is why the tone and application of the style guide has to be on point - else, well, you may as well either end up leaving it to rot in the vault of other content, or force it down users' throats... Which will of course lead them to resent any such 'guide' from then on.

So what do I mean by a style guide?

For me, these two charts are instantly recognisable.

For the left hand side chart, the colour scheme, faded background and font indicate that this is a visualisation by the Financial Times.

On the right, the subtle colour, the little red box in the top left and the manner of annotations suggest to me that this is a visual by the Economist.

How do firms encourage such homogenous practice? How can they enforce to their various employees "this is how we design here"?

For meet this kind of objective, a style guide can act as a template. Not as an exhaustive list of showing users how to display, comment on and deliver every single chart - but a way to gently prompt the creative process, whilst keeping the user on brand. This allows a starting point, and speaking as someone who hasn't had a ton of experience as a professional business analyst over the years, I believe this sort of process can help everyone in every part of the business.

Offering design principles not only enforces brand guidelines, but also can prompt users in the direction of best practices. And for those who aren't as confident in design, it can help to do that part of the 'thinking' process for them - with layout, colour, font etc all mentioned in such a document.

One of the first styles guides I came across when researching for this series was this, by the Sunlight Foundation.

This was one of, if not the, best example of a comprehensive, dedicated style guide built to represent data visualisation. Further, it highlights a lot of great best practice when creating this style guide - For instance, I particularly like the fact that there is a small crosstab on this slide/page, as it shows the structure that the data should be in when creating a bar chart. The more comprehensive guide, which can be found here has a lot more good examples for you to check out.

What's Next?

The next, or first, part of this series will focus upon chart and visualisation types - the core of this entire series really. I'll explore how to segment chart types, different ways of guiding the user and why such a practice is so important.

Thanks for reading, any and all feedback is always welcome.