Micro Visualisations How can visualisations enhance typography?

Based on the disciplines of data visualisation and typography, this thesis discusses visualisations as a means to enrich text to improve text text comprehension and memorability. A taxonomy is proposed that differentiates specific types of application visualisations may have in this context.

Drawing upon the taxonomy, the thesis elaborates two approaches to aligning a text’s visual appearance and its content. The first explores the addition of graphical elements right within or adjacent to a text while the other approach explores the optical modification of a text by means of visualisation. For this I evaluate how typographic techniques can be used as visual variables. Along with the proposed systematic I introduce the term »Micro Visualisation« describing the non-complex enhancements made to the »amorphous« text. In this work I summarize the historical derivation of text and images from a media-theoretical perspective, discuss my approach in regard to the current state of the two disciplines of visualisation and typography, introduce a taxonomy in order to categorize existing work and conclude with an analysis of opportunities and challenges for future work.

Publications Associated Publications

Micro Visualizations: Data-driven typography and graphical text enhancement

— InfoVis Poster, 2015
At the intersection of information visualization and typography lies the design space of micro visualization, a family of basic techniques enriching text in regard of its accessibility, comprehensibility, and memorability. We propose a taxonomy that differentiates specific types of visualizations applied to text design and layout. We elaborate two main approaches to aligning the visual appearance of a text and its content. The first explores the addition of graphical elements embedded into or adjacent to a text, while the other approach explores the visual modification of a text by means of typographic visualization. For this we evaluate how different techniques can be used as visual variables.
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