No. 1: Beauty leads to understanding

Beauty draws you in, and a story gets told, says Bryan Christie, illustrator and artist who specializes in medical and scientific illustrations. Christie showed an early graphic depicting the affects of Anthrax poisoning. The figure was stiff, inhuman and, well, purple. On a vacation to Rome, and the Vatican, he saw Michaelangelo's "Pieta." It floored him, he said, bringing him literally to tears. His figures now capture the expressiveness of the human form. The beauty of the human form. Christie, who uses 3-D modeling programs emphasized that we must use the tools of drawing and photography to get the most out for our work. "These are photographic tools," he said, "but in the end, it's a drawing. And we've turned out back on drawing."

No. 2: A system for thinking about dataviz

A good data visualization must start with a clear purpose and that purpose has to be followed through the steps of developing the idea, scrubbing the data and executing the visualization, according to Andy Kirk, a freelance data visualization design consultant and trainer based in the UK. Kirk is also the founder and editor of the website VisualisingData.com. 

Dataviz: 5 steps

1. Identify the purpose of the data visualization

2. Identify the questions you aim to answer

3. Acquire, explore and prepare the data

4. Conceive the visualization

5. Construct and launch

No. 3: The 6-month rule

Bryan Christie is so critical of his work, he has the 6-month rule. He waits 6 months before looking at it. If that's not a lesson to take your work seriously, to push for perfection, what could that kind of lesson be?

No. 4: The best graphics take the best reporting

The foreign graphics editor for the New York Times, Sergio Peçanha, gave an inside view to a few of his projects. Each one represented a simple journalistic lesson: Good old-fashioned reporting on a strong story trumps all. And great stories put large trends in the perspective of people, people who live in war zones and have their lives torn apart by large world events. For a photo-montage of a street in Misrata, Libya, which had been devastated by bombing, Sergio, tracked down sources to shoot photos of a stretch of the street and annotate the "normal" things that used to be there, from homes to cell phone stores. He found sources that could cross-check until the story was nailed. He did the same old shoe-leather work diagramming the progress of protests in Egypt, scanning thousands of images, tracking down sources and cross-confirming all the facts. It's easy to forget, when sitting behind the computer that we have find a story and aggressively report it.

No. 5: Speaking of which, dataviz works better with some shoe-leather

Simon Rogers, editor of the guardian.co.uk/data, a resource of raw datasets, and news editor on the Guardian emphasized a fast, journalistic take on using data for news. The Guardian's work on the UK riots demonstrated a number of quick techniques to get data, crunch it and present it in a way that is useful for users. They used twitter feeds to show how people were communicating about the riots. They used court records, some they had to scan and collate to get a solid data set to show where arrests occurred and how that corresponded with poverty. They sued and got access for court records to show how those arrested in the riots were being treated as compared to average. Whatever the subject, the Guardian crew looked as data as a live story and took aggressive steps to get that story infront of users.

No. 6: And context helps, too

Data and visualization can change the way people live their lives, especially when data is presented in an understandable way at a moment and point when people are making key decisions. Andrew Vande Moere, an associate professor at the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning of the University of Leuven in Belgium, presented simple charting at someone's house showing energy use as compared to a past benchmark. One key aspect was to have information presented to users in a natural and calm manner.