I recommend two resources on creating dashboards, both from very experienced practitioners:

1) http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/digital-dashboards-strategic-...

2) Information Dashboard Design by Stephen Few - http://www.amazon.ca/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effective-...

Good additions. For report design I found the book "Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few valuable. It talks about actionable data and has many examples.

Have a look at http://www.perceptualedge.com/blog/

There is some great critique of various BI visualisations. I highly recommend the book Information Dashboard Design by the author Stephen Few

Stephen Few's book, Information Dashboard Design, is about the design industry bible on the subject. (His other books are supposedly good, too.)

As many of the other comments in here have noted, the design of a good dashboard is often "don't design one, you need something else."

"Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few was the book that got me rolling. A good mixture of what and why.

Have a look at "Information Dashboard Design" by Stephen Few, I also found "The Non-designer's Design Book" by Robin Williams very good but it's more concerned with general design principle then the specific stuff you're interested in.

The book "Information Dashboard Design" is a good starting point for the fundamentals.

I can second the recommendation for the Information Dashboard Design book. It provides some extremely clear guidance and recommendations. Thanks for the pointer to the first resource, I'll definitely check that out.

See instead

Tufte, Edward: The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (and the followup books)

Few, Stephen: Information Dashboard Design

I've done quite a bit of reading about digital dashboards, and agree. The first example in "Information Dashboard Design" is filled with gauges - and an explanation of why it's a bad design.

Edward Tufte's books are absolutely amazing, and filled with beautiful visualizations: https://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/books_vdqi.

Stephen Few has several books on dashboards/charting that are really practical. See http://www.perceptualedge.com/examples.php for a taste.

This is what I got from the article. data.gov has LOADS of datasets for the USA, as well as hundreds of other APIs from different departments that can be used to retrieve that data in real time.

The problem comes just after you click "download" and realize you have a 600MB XML file listing the Ph levels of groundwater sites around the country for the past 25 years. How in the hell are you going to make that data an interesting draw that users want to read or learn about?

I have no skill for frontend design, but I've recently begun to learn how to display data in an intelligent manner. If anyone is interested, these books have helped me:

Information Dashboard Design: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596100162

Visualizing Data: http://www.amazon.com/Visualizing-Data-Explaining-Processing...

Beautiful Data: http://www.amazon.com/Beautiful-Data-Stories-Elegant-Solutio...

Information Dashboard Design - is definitely the first one you should read. It really gives a more high level overview of charting best practices and dashboard design.

Show me the Numbers - goes much more in depth about the details of the different chart types and visualization best practices. There's a chapter or two on each of the main chart types.

Now You See It - This is described as a companion book to Show me the Numbers and focuses on data analysis as opposed to pure visualization.

> He's making a claim of bad faith on the other party

The way I read it, the author never made a claim of bad faith. The sentence: "I doubt that any breaches of contract were willful" indicates the author assumed they were dealing in good faith (just incompetently).

> and saying, "due to it many breaches of contract, O’Reilly has no choice now but to surrender its rights to the book, so I’m free to publish the second edition of Information Dashboard Design through Analytics Press."

From what I read, the author wasn't just saying "they breached the contract, therefore I get my rights back"; he had this written into the contract via an amendment after the first breach: "an amendment to the contract was written to prevent this from happening again, or in the event that it did, to make sure that O’Reilly surrendered its rights to the book, posthaste".

> If I were Analytics Press, I'd be very uneasy being the third wheel in this sort of relationship with the unresolved matter of breach of contract still in play.

Were I Analytics Press, I would certainly want to examine the facts in question to make sure the author held the rights to the book. If I were able to verify:

a) The author had a valid provision in his contract that caused the rights to revert to him in the event of a breach, AND
b) Clear evidence of a breach of contract by the previous publisher

I'd likely be willing to take on the risk in this situation. The important thing is to acknowledge the risk, and do your due diligence to verify that the party has the rights they are providing you.

No, it's not common to see this kind of visualisation. Bad visualisations? Yeah, they're pretty common. The usual mistake is overuse of Pie Charts.

I'd recommend the OP (and anyone else who has an interest in communication) to read:

The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Visual-Display-Quantitative-Info...

Information Dashboard Design
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Information-Dashboard-Design-Effecti...

Now You See
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Now-You-See-Stephen-Few/dp/097060198...

I would strongly suggest perusing through the resources of Stephen Few over at Perceptual Edge.

Library: http://www.perceptualedge.com/library.php

You could do a lot worse than becoming familiar with Few's "Information Dashboard Design" book, and the Perceptual Edge blog contains a wealth of material, some of which ended up in his subsequent books.

Older posts on his blog also include reviews of different author's books, often having to do with cognition or analysis related topics which are also informative. Seems he has retired from his consultant business and now blogs at: http://www.stephen-few.com

Here's one of his whitepapers you may find helpful:
https://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/Whitepapers/Formatti...

While this is good in the sense that 99% of dashboards are worthless drek and anything that helps that is good, the examples given here are surprisingly poor. Even a cursory reading of the book they themselves recommend (Stephen Few's "Information Dashboard Design") would know this.

In fact, it appears the author may not have even read Few's book because they fail to mention some fundamental points about dashboard design that need to be understood if the design isn't going to just be a form of simple data analysis tool.

Overall, if you're interested in dashboard design, I'd give this course a miss and just read Stephen Few's book on the subject.

I would also recommend checking out Stephen Few's books (Information Dashboard Design and/or Show Me the Numbers) for quick and useful guidelines on visually communicating data. Few is a big advocate of Tufte's work and books, and he has a nice set of good vs bad practices in Information Dashboard Design.

I've been an evangelist for Few's books and practices as a "best" starting place for those of us less naturally gifted at data visualization (especially for simpler data or business purposes). He has heavily influenced how I look at typical IT charts and graphs.

I would recommend starting with Stephen Few's books: Show Me the Numbers and Information Dashboard Design: Displaying Data for At-a-Glance Monitoring to get an idea of visualization from a business needs perspective. These are easy reads.

Few is heavily influenced (and cites) Edward Tufte - Tufte is probably the definitive reference for communicating data with visual techniques. If you are interested in pursuing scientific visualization, you probably need to spend some time with Tufte. I never have properly done this myself.

These sources will give you a solid foundation without being tied to specific tech. You'll probably find lots of libraries built on top of d3.js that implement the basic ideas of both authors. I have been meaning to look at data exploration examples (e.g., stuff with visualization examples in R) and translate to different front/backend. That might be neat too.

Build some examples where the visualization provides real insight to a defined business problem and you will probably score some new opportunities for yourself.

Good luck.

They arn't. Stephen Few wrote a really good book a few (ha!) years back called 'Information Dashboard Design' (0596100167) which addressed the issue of circular dials and gauges. Here is a good essay on the subject by Stephen Few (http://www.perceptualedge.com/articles/08-21-07.pdf). Basically, it boils down to the same arguments put forward by Tufte et al. It is far easier to compare horizontal or vertical positions than radial values.

I will confess to being somewhat concerned regarding the author's legal plight. He's making a claim of bad faith on the other party to his contract and saying, "due to it many breaches of contract, O’Reilly has no choice now but to surrender its rights to the book, so I’m free to publish the second edition of Information Dashboard Design through Analytics Press."

While I believe that he would probably prevail, the author is building his future plans on the assumption that O'Reilly won't sue him for breach of contract and, if they do, the courts will rule in his favor. If I were Analytics Press, I'd be very uneasy being the third wheel in this sort of relationship with the unresolved matter of breach of contract still in play.