This quarter, our theme is water and I have had my eyes stuck outside the window and up toward the sky to notice the clouds. More about that journey in the next article, but for today - I am here to share some tools I use to hold large amount of information.
To explain them clearly, I’m going to borrow examples from last month’s theme: food.
Last quarter - I spent some time paying attention to my eating patterns - how many meals do I eat every day? How nutrient dense are these meals? How often I order take-out, exercise patterns etc.
As you can imagine, this is a lot of information to track using our usual nature journaling methods where we draw what we eat and then make notes like I notice, I wonder, It reminds me of. At times like these, I rely on simplification, diagramming, and data visualization tools.
Here is the visual I went with:
The KEY to Interpret the data
That is a lot of information condensed in a small space! Let me break down how I thought about this:
When we try to visualize a large amount of information, our brain instinctively organizes it using a combination of:
Shape
Size
Color
Marks
I think of these as four small containers where each container holds different kind of information and meaning, and when you combine them thoughtfully, you can pack an incredible amount of information onto a single page — without it feeling chaotic.
The Four Containers
1. Shape Container
Holds information like “what kind? which group/category”?
Usually, one shape represents one instance of the thing you’re observing.
In my food journal, I used:
A Circle to represent the main meals like breakfast, lunch, dinner,
A Triangle to represent snacking behavior in between meal
You could also choose:
Circles for home-cooked meals
Squares for eating out
Triangles for snacks
Or something entirely different.
2. Size Container
Holds information like “How much? How many? How big? How often?
Size carries information about quantity/density/frequency etc.
In my food journal, I used size to represent how much of each nutrient did my meal contain.
Was it protein dense? Did it mainly contain carbs?
Size changes the visual weight of the page.
Even without reading a legend, your eye feels the difference.
3. Color Container
Holds information like “category, intensity, emotion”
The Color container is highly versatile. It can hold multiple layers at once.
A. Category Information
Like shape, color can also distinguish between different groups. But it does it louder. It’s one of the most immediate ways to guide attention and signal what matters.
I use color to represent the highest-priority layer of the story — the thing I most want to see clearly at a glance.
In my food journal, the central question wasn’t just what I ate. It was whether I was mostly eating balanced meals or quietly over-indexing on sugar (my sweet tooth has a way of hiding in plain sight).
Instead of assigning that distinction to shape, I gave it to my loudest container: color.
B. Intensity
Alternatively, you can vary intensity i.e. saturation or value to represent: Strength, Amount, Frequency
This is how I track the secondary layers of my story.
Changes in intensity still register visually. Your eye notices light blue versus royal blue. It notices pale grey versus charcoal. But that shift is quieter than switching between red, yellow, and green.
Hue differences shout.
Value differences whisper.
So when something matters but doesn’t need to dominate the page, I adjust saturation or darkness instead of changing the color family entirely
C. Emotion or Condition
Color is intuitive. It lets someone feel the data before they analyze it.
Green feels different than Red.
Bright yellow feels different than gray.
In my food journal, I specifically used green and orange because I wants former to say - Yay! give me more, and the latter to say - okay girl! calm down on that ice-cream
4. Marks Container
Holds information like Behavior, attributes, etc.
Marks, in my opinion, are the most versatile of all containers. They are small additions layered onto shapes - Dots. Lines. Texture. Arrows. Outlines.
This is my favorite container because it can quietly hold nuance.
I mainly use marks to store two kinds of information:
A. Behavior
What did it do? What are some of it’s features?
My food journal exercise hoes not have an example of Marks, but here is what that could look like in a different example.
B. Physical Attributes
What special feature did it have?
……. And Then There Is the Position and Orientation
The four containers describe what piece of information each symbol holds, but once you have symbols, you may decide:
How you might organize your collection of containers on your journal page.
That’s when I think about Position / Orientation (Thanks for coming up with this one - Theresa Ho)
1. Linear (Timeline Thinking)
When, in our data, we want to show sequence of events, our brains default to a line.
Left to right.
Top to bottom.
In my food journal, I organized entries linearly where each diagram represented a day of data / meals tracked.
2. Circular (Clock Thinking)
When something repeats daily or at certain hours of the day, a circle might make sense.
In my food journal, I experimented with circular layout to track Breakfast at the 10am position of the clock, lunch at the 1pm position and dinner at 7pm position :
A circle suggests rhythm instead of progression.
3. Spatial (Map Thinking)
Sometimes location matters more than time.
You might spread containers/symbols across a page like a map.
If we track the cat’s behavior in the house over a 1 hr period, it may be organized somewhat like this:
4. Axes (Correlation)
Sometimes you don’t want to show sequence or location — you want to show relationship. That’s where axes come in.
The moment you draw an X and Y axis, your brain shifts into comparison mode. Up/down becomes “more or less.” Left/right becomes “this versus that.”
Instead of just documenting what happened, you begin to see correlation, clusters, and outliers.
There are so many way to structure the information and these barely scratch the surface.
Would you like to see how others are thinking about data visualization? Have some ideas/examples to share? Hop on to this Padlet space!! The rest of us would love to see where you are at!
How This Applies to this quarter’s Theme
As we turn toward water this quarter, these tools stay the same. My theme being clouds, here are some questions I am exploring:
How might I represent different cloud types using different shapes?
What containers + orientation combination might I use to show temperature, humidity, pressure, dew point
What marks might capture movement and direction?
How much information is too much information to gather?
I’ve had to give myself this pep talk more than once and hopefully it might help you too:
Start small. Choose only a few pieces of information to track to avoid overwhelm.
Keep it simple. Let the system evolve as you notice more. The first step is the hardest one to take!
Clarity comes from use, not from over-designing. We’re not trying to make perfect infographics. We’re learning how to see.