Fundamentals of graphical perception
posted Mon 22 Mar 2010 by Michael Galloy under VisualizationFlowingData has a great post about learning the fundamentals of graphical perception. In particular, the common techniques for encoding quantitative information are ordered by how accurately people can decode them according to William S. Cleveland and Robert McGill’s paper Graphical Perception: Theory, Experimentation, and Application to the Development of Graphical Methods. For a lot more information about this type of thing, see Colin Ware’s Information Visualization.