Category Archives: Font Visualization

Font visualization using attributes such as bold, italic and case.

Lyrics as Tiles: Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy coded with Color and Texture

Posted on December 11, 2021 by richardbrath

Song lyrics depend heavily on rhythm, syllables and rhyme (in some songs such as pop songs). Some poetry visualizations add white space between words and lines, which can then be filled with various visualization techniques, such as forming links between … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, SparkWord, Text Skimming, Text Visualization, texture | 2 Comments

Modley’s Pictographs and Graphs

Posted on November 30, 2021 by richardbrath

Rudolf Modley was a key figure in the popularization of Isotype in the United States. I’ve previously written about Isotype (e.g. hypothesizing what happened to it, and thematic axes). I recently received Modley and Lowenstein’s book Pictographs and Graphs (1952, … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Isotype | Leave a comment

Using Font Attributes with D3.js

Posted on November 24, 2018 by richardbrath

Most of the typographic visualization examples on this site are created in D3.js, using  SVG. There are tons of examples of D3 on the web used to create bars, dots, etc; but not many online examples where font attributes are … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Text Visualization | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Color in Text Visualization

Posted on March 24, 2018 by richardbrath

Highlighting text via bold or italic is less noticeable than color. There is an incredibly long history of the use of color in a continuum from medieval times to present. From a visualization perspective, color is scoped to the level of words, … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Text Visualization | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Text Visualization and Code Editors

Posted on January 31, 2018 by richardbrath

Long before I started investigating typographic attributes for data visualization, Aaron Marcus and Ron Baecker were doing the same thing for software code. Back in the mid 1980s there weren’t integrated development environments, no integrated debugging tools and so on. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Legibility, Text Visualization | Leave a comment

Stem & Leaf Bigrams

Posted on November 30, 2017 by richardbrath

Stem & leaf plots are quirky alphanumeric data visualizations. In typical usage they show distributions of numeric values. Here’s a simple dataset of heights of my family on the left, transformed into a stem and leaf plot on the right: … Continue reading →

Posted in Alphanumeric Chart, Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Text Visualization | 1 Comment

Lost Works of Jacques Bertin on Typography

Posted on October 29, 2017 by richardbrath

Strangely, out of 450 pages+ in Bertin’s Sémiologie Graphique translated into English only 4 pages about typography were not translated. Continue reading →

Posted in Alphanumeric Chart, Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Text Visualization | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Patent Visualization and Litigation Ratios

Posted on September 30, 2017 by richardbrath

Earlier this week, Scott Langevin and I were fortunate to speak at the Strata Big Data Conference in NYC. The topic was Text Analytics and New Visualization Techniques. It discussed some of the examples on this blog and my research; and additionally … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Graph Visualization | Tagged | Leave a comment

Variable Fonts vs. Parametric Fonts and Data Visualization

Posted on August 26, 2017 by richardbrath

I’ve typically been using ready-made fonts to create font-based visualizations in this blog. However, sticking to ready-made fonts means that you get only one slope angle for italic, a few levels of weight, maybe a condensed version or maybe not. … Continue reading →

Posted in Data Visualization, Font Visualization, parametric fonts, Text Skimming, Text Visualization, Variable Fonts | Tagged , | 2 Comments

The Origin of Thematic Maps — and the problem with base maps

Posted on July 8, 2017 by richardbrath

Why is there such a big gap between thematic maps and label maps? Both types of maps show data about places. Thematic maps typically use lots of color to show data about places; whereas label maps use a lot of … Continue reading →

Posted in Choropleth, Data Visualization, Font Visualization, Thematic Map | 2 Comments