What is Visual Encoding?
In an imaginary world, where the human eye would be perfect, we could even see atoms side by side. And imaginary speaking, concepts like color, angle, size, height, position, shape would have been probably unknown. In our world things are quite different, and as far as it concerns our visual perception, all the mentioned qualities comprise our basic tools to interpret it.
What about the world of data? Is it closer to the imaginary or the real world? I would choose the first, as in my mind, raw data is just strings and number characters side by side. I just mentioned the phrase in my mind and that is because what really matters, after all, is how human perception can understand data in a more meaningful, direct, and intuitive manner. To succeed that, visual objects must be used. And here comes visual encoding, which is the way data are represented in visual objects. In the following picture, we can see which are the ways we can encode our data.
