The Silicon Jungle

No matter how you’re using a graphics program, remember the RDHP—the Rough-Draft Hierarchical Principle. It also may help at times when you word-process memos.

The principle: create the basic pictures or prose yourself. But if pressed for time? Then farm out the details. Just as a secretary might put your memos in the right format on paper, he or she might also smooth your drawings. Or your art department might.

Here are other tips for graphics users:

A line chart—a graph with the outlines of hills and valleys—is great when broad trends count more than the numbers themselves.

One glance at a good line chart can tell you if wok sales are up or down.

And for even better effect, you might try a curve chart, or area chart, filling in the area below the curves that the lines make.

“Instead of looking like a wriggly line,” explains Carl Herrman,^[103] an award-winning graphics expert, “it looks like a mountain. It’s much easier to follow.”

And if you want to show sales trends in three wok categories? Well, you can still use a filled-in chart.

“You might fill in the bottom one solid black,” says Herrman. “You might do a cross-hatch—parallel intersecting lines—on the middle one. And on the top one, you might have a straight-line effect or a lot of lines running close to each other.

“That way, you can readily see the difference between the three It’s more effective than three graph lines on top of each other.”

Another tool is a bar chart, with bars of different sizes—horizontal or vertical.

NAME THAT CHART With Apple’s Macintosh and the Microsoft chart graphics package from Microsoft, you can whip up charts like the ones below. Chart will even pick up numbers from a sister spreadsheet program, Multiplan. My thanks to artist Jo Steele, who works for the Dartmouth College Computer Center and is a partner in Northtronics Associates. Oh, and don’t blame Jo for the use of those over-mentioned woks. My mistake. Next time I’ll use dishwashers or watermelons.

Use a bar chart to compare sizes or emphasize differences, including those over time. With the bar chart, you might contrast 1979 wok sales with 1984’s.

Don’t normally use the bar chart, however, to illustrate trends. For that, it’s usually back to the old line or curve chart.

Just the same, Mike Slade, a product manager at Microsoft, says: “There are times when you can illustrate trends successfully using overlapping bar charts—with bars of different colors or patterns.

“You might have a vertical bar for 1979 wok sales slightly overlapping with one for 1979 widget sales and continue these twin bars for the next five years.

“Use overlapping bar charts when you’re showing trends for a number of different products or categories.”

Yet another tool, the pie chart, just like a pie, with slices, nicely shows relations of complete parts.

Use the pie chart to show the percentage of sales that came from four or five regions.

On the other hand, suppose you have many, many small components in your pie—say, you’re interested in the percentages of domestic sales in each of the fifty states. Then a map with percentages on it might be better.

I’ll stop here—this is a computer book, not a graphics guide. For more detailed information, Herrman recommends Designer’s Guide to Creating Charts and Diagrams by Nigel Holmes (from Watson-Guptill, New York).

Don’t make your charts look like puzzles. “If you clutter up your chart with too many facts, you’ll lose the very simplicity that graphics can offer,” says Herrman. Home in on your main point. “If need be,” he says, “use a short narrative under the chart to back it up.

“In fact, you might be able to say something in words more simply than with a chart. If you’re trying to compare the cost of widget imports in the last fifty years and it’s doubled each year, then why not just say so in prose?”

Also, avoid other forms of visual clutter. Don’t make people’s eyes spin with special effects and too many colors.

Grid lines—a series of little squares like those on engineering graph paper—often confuse chart readers. “Don’t put them in if you can help it,” says Herrman.

“Definitely not,” agrees my friend Hard-core bureaucrat.

In memos, don’t confuse your readers with a barrage of different typefaces. A little variety is good. But make sure you have a decent excuse, such as special points to stress or different categories of information.

“If you show off your fancy typefaces,” says my friend the Hard-Core-Bureaucrat, “it’s just a plague that’ll make your eyes ache. That’s one reason I’m down on fancy graphics for routine stuff. Some Macintosh users are going to produce memos that look like samplers from printing salesmen.”

Even on a thousand-word memo, use three of four typefaces at the most. Also, don’t stint on white space. Apple’s manuals for the Macintosh and its more expensive sister, the Lisa, are models of wise use of white space.

If you can get away with it, why not try a little flair in your graphics and your points will be more memorable.

A good model in many cases is the newspaper USA Today, which sports some of the liveliest graphics in the country.

It regularly publishes charts with such sexy facts as amount expected to go for health care in 1990 or the percentage of women who received haircuts and other beauty-shop treatments in 1983.

To jazz up the chart titled “Only Their Hairdressers Know,” an artist drew the face of a woman with her hair blowing out. The lengths of the bunched-up strands varied according to the percentages of women receiving different kinds of treatments. “Haircut” (76 percent) was three times longer than “Coloring” (a mere 24 percent). Today the average micro user may not be able to produce such “hairy” graphics, but the future may be different.

Snazzy graphics is like colorful writing. Humanize your work. The “Only Their Hairdressers Know” chart wasn’t in the fanciest of color—just black and white and blue—but it was more eye-catching than most eight-color ones might have been.

And if you yourself can’t draw too well even with a computer? Well, what a chance to liven up the workday of a young, talented aide who’d like a break from the typewriter, er, word processor!

Besides, on occasion, you can at least do what an editor may have done with the hairdresser chart—think up the basic idea.

Imagine you’re writing captions for a hybrid of the New York Times and The National Enquirer.

Try to be accurate, clear, and interesting.

Snare the skimmers! Give them no choice but to read your report.

I’ll qualify that. Alas, many report writers, especially the government species, don’t want to be clear with words or charts.

Maybe they can scrutinize this section to know what to do in reverse.

There is life without color.

Just look at the nifty things you can do with high-resolution black and white, with its many different shades.

If your picture offers widely varied shapes and sizes, color just might not help that much.

Think, too, about costs. If Mac had had color, the $2,500 introductory price would have been several times higher. So Apple concentrated instead on resolution. And very likely, some makers of similar machines will do the same. There’s a technical trade-off: color capability often comes at the cost of sharpness. Even black-and-white graphics today—at least the affordable kinds—normally are a far cry from the sharpness required in an annual report or the slickest sales brochure.

Still, to a generation weaned on color tv and movies, a 100 percent monochromatic life would be like a monastic life.

And color could be just the ticket for enlivening graphs that visually drone on and on with statistics.

What’s more, it can help separate elements of charts. Just don’t overuse or abuse the technique. Don’t use color to slice a pie chart too thin.

In working with color, you should know the best combinations. Often you’ll want to alternate weak, cool colors with strong, warm, “advancing” ones that leap out from the screen. The strongest colors usually are bright red first, then orange, then perhaps yellow—it depends on your machine and other variables.

“Your weakest colors,” says Herrman, “could be blue, green and brown. If you try blue and bright red, your chart will be much more readable than if it has green with blue. You might also use green and orange.”

Try, too, to avoid adjacent colors that “vibrate” together in an irksome way. “Red and green is worst,” Herrman says. Another loser: red and blue.

Other advice? Match colors to what they stand for. If you’re comparing oil and gas production, the oil might be black and the gas a light blue. Oil sometimes is black. And gas often bums blue.

Remember, also, that dark colors often can better represent large numbers. Say your company has its biggest, best year ever in sales. And now you’re bragging with a multiyear bar chart? Well, you use a dark blue or black bar to represent your recent, gigantic revenues. The leaner years, by comparison, might be a very light color or maybe faint grays or perhaps just white inside gray lines.

Yet another tip is to be consistent if possible. “If you’re comparing oil and gas through twenty charts,” says Herrman, “stick with oil in black and gas in blue in all the charts.”

“But,” you say, “how do I choose my graphics programs in the first place?”

Here are the questions you should ask, among others:

1. Does the program help you come up with pies, bars, or whatever kind of chart or drawing will be most useful to you?

2. Can it do so as quickly as possible?

Here programs using a mouse—the pointer on your desk—have a real advantage.

3. Does the program fit in well with your other software?

That’s one advantage of Lisa- and Mac-type systems. You can more easily stick a chart inside a page of text—perhaps sparing your readers a distracting flip to the back.

Another advantage of a “good fit” is that it may save you hours of typing and drawing. Look for programs that will let you select trends from spreadsheets, then more or less automatically whip up charts based on the numbers. This way, too, you don’t have to waste time typing in the numbers from the spreadsheets. Microsoft Chart can do that with the right software for the Mac, Lisa II, and IBM computers. Are you shopping for a program that changes charts automatically along with the numbers? Then see if you can do this without having to clear the chart from your screen and replace it with a special menu.

4. How much memory space does the program—and the electronic files of the resultant drawings—take up?

You want enough space on your disk for spreadsheets, word processing, and other programs if you change your tasks often. But you don’t change often? Then don’t worry as much about this.

Frugal use of space, of course, is one advantage of integrated programs combining graphics with word processing and spreadsheets or communications.

You might also worry about the lengths of the files. One chart can take up the equivalent of page after page in disk space if you’re storing the image of the chart rather than the instructions for creating it.

5. What about the program’s color capabilities—both on screen and on paper? How many colors offered? And if the program has preset color combinations, do they work well together?

6. Does the program coexist okay with the printer or plotter you own or are about to buy?

7. How easy is the program to learn? What about the other general traits of good software mentioned in Backup III, The Lucky 13?

Whatever your graphics program, don’t stint on the hardware. A good, sharp, high-resolution screen is just as important—more so, in fact—as it is in word processing.