Numbers also make it easy to present to an audience (eg. When there are a lot of text boxes and they start crowding each other, or it’s not practical to use connecting lines, you can use numbers to match the data point to the signpost. Rule #3: Numbers CAN be used as signposts. Colored signposts, boxes and lines make it faster for the reader to match the text with the correct line. When there are multiple lines, it helps to use color to match the annotations to the lines. What’s important is CONTRAST between the signpost and the text below it. Use larger, bolder, more colorful font to make the signposts stand out. It’s also easier to present graphs to an audience when they can match the words coming out of your mouth to the text on the graph. BOLD some key phrase so the eye can quickly skim the annotations. All the text should not be the same size. Long text annotations slow them down, so you need short text phrases ( “Signposts”) so the reader can skim. People need to be able to skim your graph and get the message quickly. But too much text can feel overwhelming and unwelcome to read. Here’s the entry from Matt Chambers ( modified by me to start with poor text annotations, so I can show the complete process step by step. But there is more than art to good annotations there is also science, especially an understanding of how the visual path skims a graph to pick up information. Below, I capture the 10 rules of good text annotations. There was a lot of variety in the 88 entries and how they handled annotations. And in January they challenged their readers to design an annotated line graph. So I was excited to see the folks over at are running a monthly graph challenge. And text annotations are an important part of bringing that story to life.
Good annotations how to#
In my Storytelling with Graphs workshop, and my soon-to-be published book, I teach business professionals how to design graphs to make the story quick and clear.
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