I'm not here to make your data look pretty.
"Good design is clear thinking made visible" -Edward Tufte
Geographic Visualization, the Artist Formerly Known as Cartography, derives much of its power to speak because it is visual. We humans are voracious abstract visual thinkers: just try not seeing the characters in front of you as words that denote meaning. Or eevn wehn the wrods are sellped wonrg, our bainrs jsut power thugroh fnie, in part because we don't just see letters, we mentally 'chunk' information into high-level structures shaped in large part by a clever bit of programming called prior experience. In fact, we can only read as fast as we do because we don't read individual letters but groups of them called words, and beyond that at the highest level, because languages have understood rules that make certain combinations of letters and words impossible allowing our brains to filter-out the ridiculous and focus on the likely. This, however, is both a blessing and a curse since we can process information very, very quickly (hitting a 95 mp/h fastball), but we often only see what our brains tells us we should expect to see (why trick pitches work). As a result, words, maps and other graphic representations have an expressway into our consciousness, often imparting vast amounts of data in mere glance. We can't help it – it's literally how we're wired.
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