Lesson Overview

You can see one of Cole's seminars here. She stresses that six lessons of communicating with data:

Understand the context - this means knowing your audience and conveying a clear message about what you want your audience to know or do with the information you are providing.
Choose an appropriate visual display - this was covered in the last lesson. Check out the lesson titled recap in the previous section if you need a quick refresher.
Eliminate clutter - you should only provide information to the user that helps convey your message.
Focus attention where you want it - build visualizations that pull attention to the message you want to highlight.
Think like a designer - you will learn a number of design principles in this lesson to assist as you start to put together your own data visualizations.
Tell a story - your visualizations should give the audience a story. The most powerful data visualizations move people to take action.