Mar 21, 2010
Google Charts (FTW)
If you have worked as a Graphic Designer or Art Director for any length of time, you’ve been asked to integrate a chart into your design. There are some innovative and inspiring ways to create informational graphics—it’s an art-form in itself. In some cases, the experience and craft is stifled by having to accommodate changing data. For the web designer or developer, there are additional hurdles: clarity of data, being able to showing values for large data-sets, updating data frequently, how to present that same data for search engine index.
Google has introduced a tool that may help alleviate some of the designer and developer’s burden: Google Chart Tool. This new service from Google allows you to use a generated image or, via javascript, a live rendering of your data on your webpage or presentation. The solution includes a gallery with a huge selection of graphic solutions to present data in a variety of forms.
Your chart can be fed data from a huge variety of sources. The most simple is to create your data parameters in Google Docs and “connect” that data to your chart for real-time updates. Google also provides an embedded data solution that allows you to provide plain-language data within your page. Although there is no documentation the data is enclosed in Google’s tagging structure and will likely be indexed for search and categorized as “charted data”. This can be an advantage to content that relies on the expression of data as a business model or a differentiator. The charting API (Application Programming Interface) also allows you to tie your chart to a wide variety of dynamic solutions including JAVA, JSON and XML.
Although the solution provided by Google is not a replacement for good graphic design and creating a comprehensive design solution for your information, it does give designers and developers a tool that allows for flexible inclusion of data into a web design and separates presentation from the data itself. It is crucial to remember that using Google’s (or any third-party tool) for charting will have you relying on that party for your site’s integrity. If the service changes or goes down, your data may not display properly, or at all. These same solutions will give you a great looking solution without creating a custom code or constantly updating data and give you more opportunity to focus on making your site’s design great.
Learn more about information graphics and design around data and take a look at some of the sites and books below:
