CHART: Designing Creative Data Visualizations from Charts to Art

by Nadieh Bremer

Overview

CHART is a guide to unleashing creativity in data visualization. It takes you on a journey along the spectrum from an ordinary chart to data art, packed with ways to bring more creativity into any visualization. It will help to make your visuals more compelling and memorable, long after the numbers have been crunched.

Drawing from over a decade of experience, the author shares thirteen hands-on, tool-agnostic lessons, each filled with actionable insights and unique perspectives. Between these core lessons, you’ll find tips, mini-chapters, and dozens of real-world examples from both client and personal projects. The book also includes exclusive glimpses into early sketches, works-in-progress, and in-depth design stories that reveal how creativity in data is often a messy, non-linear, but ultimately rewarding process.

CHART: Designing Creative Data Visualization from Charts to Art is designed for journalists, data analysts, business professionals, and newcomers alike, these lessons empower readers to push beyond the default. By the end of the book, you’ll have the tools and inspiration to transform typical charts and graphs into visuals that not only inform but also captivate and connect with your audience.

This book invites you to break the mold and think outside the chart.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040359129
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	06/06/2025
Series:	AK Peters Visualization Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	284
File size:	63 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Nadieh Bremer, an award-winning data visualization designer and data artist with a background in astronomy, creates custom visualizations for clients like Google and The New York Times. She co-authored Data Sketches and is known for transforming complex data into engaging visual stories.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Part I | Staying Close to Ordinary Charts

1. Give a Chart Something Unique | “The topic or subject of the data can be great inspiration to elevate a straightforward chart”

2. Consider Uncommon Chart Types | “Nontraditional charts can be more expressive and communicate certain data insights more effectively”

I. MINI CHAPTER | Broaden Your Horizon of Visual Forms

3. Combine Charts | “Fusing chart types together can create distinctive and compelling visuals”

II. MINI CHAPTER | Use Circular Shapes

Part II | Getting Creative

4. Amplified Encoding | “Present the same variable in diverse ways to achieve something more visually captivating”

III. MINI CHAPTER | Projecting Your Data onto Other Visuals

5. Sketch Designs First | “Use plain pen and paper to sketch rough concepts to develop more expressive ideas”

6. Don’t Think in Chart Types | “Think less in “chart types” and more about what information, patterns, and stories to reveal when going for more creative visuals”

Part III | Aiming for Visual Diversity

7. Show All the Data | “Show the most granular level of detail in the data set to present intriguing context”

8. Show Aggregate Values with Granular Data | “If you need to show aggregated insights, reveal them using more granular data and clever design tricks”

9. Add More Variables | “Enhance your visuals by thoughtfully adding additional variables to provide greater depth and interest to the main story”

IV. MINI CHAPTER | Refining Your Use of Color

10. Big Datasets, Big Possibilities | “Bigger datasets lend themselves more easily to creative data visualization”

V. MINI CHAPTER | Creative Legends

Part IV | Diving into Data Art

11. Find Inspiration from Your Interests | “Pull artistic inspiration—as well as techniques and tools—from other creative areas of your life to give your data visuals some flair”

12. Add Randomness into the Mix | “Randomness broadens your visual possibilities and will reveal unexpected, refreshing outcomes”

V. MINI CHAPTER | Sketching Your Data Art Ideas

13. Let the Subject of the Data Guide Your Design | “In data art, the overarching theme or topic of the data holds more design significance than the precise figures”

Outro

Think Outside the Chart

Acknowledgements

Index

Editorial Reviews

"The Data Sketches collaboration is a glorious tour de force: two people spur each other along a remarkable spiral of visualization creativity, and let the rest of us come along for the ride! Nadieh and Shirley share their sketches and code, experiments and explorations, reflections and realizations, eurekas and backtracks, and infectious enthusiasm. They each bring a unique vector, voice, and style to the 12 project topics; what unites them is deep technical chops and a superlative eye for design."

—Tamara Munzner, Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia, Chair of the Executive Committee of IEEE Visualization, Author of Visualization Analysis and Design

"What a rare treat it is for Shirley and Nadieh to share their process so openly! We see not only the technical work—prototyping with real data, riffing from examples—but the circuitous emotional journey from rough concept to polished final product. Shirley and Nadieh are honest, entertaining, and insightful in their retrospectives. For anyone interested in visualization, their stories are a powerful lesson of how designs can be shaped to communicate effectively and with intent. And their openness and humility make the practice less intimidating, inviting newcomers to get started."

—Mike Bostock, Creator of D3.js and Founder of Observable

"The work of Nadieh Bremer & Shirley Wu is some of the most beautiful and exciting data visualization work being done today. They bring incredible aesthetics to complex data to enlighten and evoke joy in their audiences. In Data Sketches we get to see some of their best, most personal work and, more than that, we get their explanation of what inspired them and how they accomplished such amazing work. This book is a treat for both the eye and the mind."

—Elijah Meeks, Executive Director of the Data Visualization Society and Author

"This book brings the perfect blend of ingredients together for a nourishing recipe of inspiration and knowledge beneficial to beginners and experienced practitioners alike. Nadieh and Shirley are generational talents. Through their data visualisation work they relentlessly exhibit a wide spectrum of capabilities across the creative, editorial, analytical, and technical dimensions. Above all, they are wonderful communicators. They know how to skilfully communicate to audiences through data. And now, through this book, they share detailed stories of their process giving us the privilege of learning what, why and how they do what they do."

—Andy Kirk, Data Visualisation Specialist, Author, and Editor of visualisingdata.com

"Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu are wondrous eccentrics. Their splendid book is the product of a collaborative experimental project, Data Sketches, that might be one of the first exponents of an emerging visualization orthodoxy in which uniqueness is paramount and templates and conventions are viewed with scepticism."

—Alberto Cairo, Knight Chair at the University of Miami and Author - from the Foreword

"Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu’s Data Sketches collaboration is a great example of what you can do with data visualization beyond a standard chart. They show that visualization can be both useful and beautiful. They show the many possibilities when you put thought into the data and the visuals. The best part of Data Sketches is that Bremer and Wu documented their processes, so that you can learn the tools they used, the messiness of the data, and how they get over the bumps along the way."

—Nathan Yau, Creator of FlowingData and Author

"Written in an approachable, first-person angle, this book is a delightful behind-the-scenes look at the process for creating any sophisticated data visualization. It provides many personal tips for every stage of development, from data collection and analysis, to sketching and final production. The authors have done a tremendous job in demystifying a normally opaque practice. They made it seem so easy you will want to start on your own project right away."

—Manual Lima, Design Lead, Author, Mentor, and Lecturer. RSA Fellow. TED Speaker. Founder of VisualComplexity.com.

"As an educator focused on computational media, I consistently point students towards Shirley and Nadieh's work for inspiration. I am so thrilled and excited that they've synthesized years of hard work and exploration into Data Sketches, which is now my go-to resource for coders interested in creative expression and storytelling with data!"

—Dan Shiffman, Author, Director of The Processing Foundation, Associate Arts Professor at ITP/IMA, Tisch School of the Arts, NYU

"A visual duet to savor! This tag-team visualization bonanza is a total knockout!"

—Jim Vallandingham, Data Visualization Designer and Data Scientist at Zymergen

From the Publisher