Graphic design

Content for Monday, June 9, 2025–Friday, June 13, 2025

Readings

Required readings

Foundational principles:

• Chapter 5 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
• Chapter 4 and Chapter 27 in Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Wilke 2018)

Graphic design principles:

• Summary of CRAP graphic design principles from Presentation Zen (Reynolds 2008). These principles are from Robin Williams’ The Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books (Williams 2008), which you should really get if you’re interested in doing anything design-related ever. Her stuff is life-changing.
• Color palettes
• Typography in ten minutes. The rest of the Practical Typography book is phenomenal and you’d be remiss if you didn’t read the whole thing and bookmark it for life, but for now just read this quick summary.
• “File formats explained”

Readings you should glance through and use as resources

Colors:

• Cédric Scherer, “Colors and emotions in data visualization”
• Lisa Charlotte Muth, “Emphasize what you want readers to see with colors”
• Lisa Charlotte Muth, “How to find & create good color palettes”.
• Lisa Charlotte Muth, “A detailed guide to colors in data vis style guides”. You can skim this—this is a good resource for future you.

Fonts:

• Font Matrix – See & Pair Typefaces Like Never Before. In the videos, I mention that you should use contrasting font families, like choosing a sans serif and a serif font. But in reality, mixing fonts well is more complicated than that. The designer here presents something called the Font Matrix that will help you find good font combinations.

Slides

The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Truth, beauty, stories, design
• Graphic design and CRAP
• Image types

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Cairo, Alberto. 2016. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Berkeley, California: New Riders.

Reynolds, Garr. 2008. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 1st ed. Berkeley, California: New Riders.

Wilke, Claus E. 2018. Fundamentals of Data Visualization. Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media. https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/.

Williams, Robin. 2008. The Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books: Design and Typographic Principles for the Visual Novice. Deluxe Edition. Berkeley, California: Peachpit Press.