Is Simple a Fancy or a Feeling?

Using Simple Design for Maximum Clarity in Your Chart Building

By: Kimberly Grant

Many people are visual.  We see with our eyes, then interpret what we see by feeling with our hearts.  It’s sort of like seeing your crush and feeling butterflies in your stomach. As humans, we experience a lot with our eyes.  Joseph Williams, author of  Toward Clarity and Grace, even describes the act of reading someone’s writing as “a feeling behind our eyes”.  He’s making the argument that our eyes take visual cues and turn them into mental experiences; much like reading a book.

Scott Berinato further emphasizes the way we feel with our eyes in his book Good Charts.  Berinato talks about how to put the finishing touches on a chart or graph to impress an audience.  In his theories, less is more.  As a visual person, I agree.  Less is certainly enough when there’s a potential to be inundated with so many visual cues, the eyes have nowhere to truly land.  According to Berinato, this type of over distinguishing of elements is known as belt-and-suspenders design.  There are so many distinguishing elements, that the creator or originator, needs to make the hard call of deciding on one or two elements and getting rid of the rest.  The graph below is a visual aid for more is more.

There’s enough data in this graph to wonder what it all means, especially the numbers in the y axis.  Are the numbers really conveying success or failure?  Not to mention the title of the graph is vague, has too many elements, and the red is too dramatic for the information being conveyed. 

Yes, simplicity is key to having clarity (read: clear visuals that make sense) in charts.  However, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to simplicity in chart-making.  Rather, Berinato argues that relative simplicity is the best, because it shows “how little you can show and still convey your idea clearly” and is specific to the type of communication you want to convey.  Now, I’ve talked about this visual design technique before and I will refer back to it because it completely personifies an aspect of relative simplicity: negative space. 

While there are lot of preferences in the world, most people like a simple design, because it creates the “feeling behind the eyes” of calm.  Clutter, being the opposite of simplicity, leads to feelings of being overwhelmed.  These days, life is overwhelming enough without having to decipher an overwhelming chart that’s just trying to tell you something simple, like which marketing mediums had the most success for your latest ad campaign.  The chart below can be your guide to relative simplicity.

In the above chart, the colors are neutral and there is a simple design of the information that’s being conveyed: social media experienced the most success for the latest marketing ad campaign.  Being able to see this information at a glance helps marketers begin to interpret what areas may need a little more work.

The idea that using just enough visual space to get your point across is key in marketing.  It could mean the difference between your target audience skipping over your advertisement or stopping to take a look.  The audience wants to feel they understand.

Making charts relatively simple, almost always guarantees that the audience will enjoy the feeling of understanding the message and can interpret the meaning.  The alternative is treating your ad like a man in the friend zone: your audience will just smile, nod, and never pay any attention to your product.