Book Review: Storytelling with Data

Over the holidays I picked up a few top rated books on data visualization from Amazon, due, in part, to my recent participation in the 2018 Kaggle ML & DS Survey Challenge and NFL Punt Safety Competition. The first book I picked up was "Storytelling with Data: A Vizualization Guide for Business Professionals" by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, a data analyst at Google. Although the book is tailored toward the business crowd and not the data science community specifically, it still covers general principles that could be useful to anyone making data visualizations.


As a business-oriented book, the writing is very approachable (although certain business lingo is overused) and the author explains any terms that may be unknown to a general audience. Although the book is about 250 pages long and covers a semi-technical topic, it reads much faster than you might expect. Between the numerous figures, generous use of white space and the font, the amount of text per page is low enough that the pages turn faster than you'd expect. The book focuses on practical advice and visualizations: every plot in the book is created with Microsoft Excel, so don't expect to see any particularly unique plots. It doesn't cover the technical aspects of how to actually create the plots themselves, but rather discusses the decision making process that goes into planning and crafting a successful plot.


Storytelling with Data is separated into 6 main chapters, each covering a different "lesson" to craft effective visualizations, followed by a few chapters of examples putting all the concepts together. The 6 lessons are:


1. Understand the Context -- This chapter deals with  understanding your audience and what you want them to know.

2. Choose an Appropriate Visual Display -- This chapter explains the best use cases of various types of plots and plotting techniques to avoid.

3.Eliminate Clutter -- This chapter focuses on removing plot ink that does not enhance understanding.

4.Focus Attention Where you Want It -- This chapter discusses the use of visual attributes and cues like color, size and position to draw the viewer's attention to the most important parts of a plot.

5. Think Like a Designer -- This chapter covers a variety of considerations to make plots more aesthetically pleasing and effective.

6. Tell a Story -- The final lesson covers strategies to create a narrative with visualizations and spark a call to action.


The book is well organized and provides a lot of practical advice that could be useful to just about anyone making visual communication materials with data. Breaking the core concepts down into a few digestible and memorable rules enhances the staying power the concepts are likely to have and it makes it easier to use the book as a quick reference.


On the down side, the print quality of the plots in the paperback book is poor. I found many of the plots and figures to be faded and blurry. In a book about data visualization, you'd expect crisp, nice-looking plots. Although the print quality of the text itself is fine, something feels wrong about reading about how to make aesthetically appealing plots, only look at figures that are muted and sometimes hard to read due to faded printing. This disconnect between the written text and the quality of the visualizations on the page detracts from the book's authority. It is both unfortunate and ironic for a book about storytelling with data visualizations to have its own story break down from time to time due to poorly printed plots. From the quick glance I took at the kindle version of the book, the plots appeared to be much crisper there, so I'd strongly suggest getting this book in digital rather than paper form if that's an option for you.


Overall, Storytelling with Data: A Vizualization Guide for Business Professionals is a good book with a lot of practical tips for communicating with data that suffers from an unfortunate case of poor print quality in the paperback version of the book. On the one hand, I don't feel that I can be overly harsh on the author due to the print quality because the plots do appear to look better in the digital version, but on the other hand, first impressions matter and the lacking plot quality detracted from my experience, even though I enjoyed reading the text.


I give Storytelling with Data. A vizualization guide for business professionals 3.25 out of 5 stars: Good.