Increasing Visual Scalability

As we increase the number of objects being represented, the visualization may become more and more difficult to comprehend.

Horizon Chart

Using a Horizon Chart is a scalable method to represent a large number of line charts.

Consider the following Horizon Chart:

Steps to obtain a Horizon chart from a Line chart:

Consider the following line chart:

Use a diverging color scale with 2 color hues to represent values above and below a certain value (say 0, or the average):

Then, flip the negative values:

Finally, for each band, collapse and stack them one on top of each other.

This leads to a scalable chart as shown above.

Sparklines

Sparklines are small, intense, word-sized graphics with typographic resolution.

They can be placed anywhere words or graphics or numbers are placed: in sentences, maps, graphics and tables.

They are used when we don't have a lot of space to represent data and can be very effective.