Dynamic annotations: tips and tricks to make text shine without stealing the show by Cara Thompson at the Shiny in Production 2023 conference, hosted by Jumping Rivers!
Abstract
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Data. It’s complicated! And there are often many facets to our data stories, which we need to present succinctly enough for our readers to want to engage with. On top of that, it changes! If we want our apps to reflect up‐to‐date data, how do we make sure the annotations stay up to date, and don’t end up off the edge of the plot or on top of each other with the next batch of data?
In this talk, we will explore how to make text work for us, by first considering how much of it we really need. Once we’ve decluttered and explored how we can use colours to make our plots less text‐dependent, we’ll look at how to optimise text hierarchy in descriptions and in‐plot annotations to keep the main thing the main thing, and how to create dynamic content and alignments for our titles, subtitles, axes, and annotations. Finally, we’ll explore coding tricks to apply these typography tips to tables and interactive plots, giving readers additional information on demand. Throughout the talk, I will share the packages and code snippets used to create and modify plots in R straight from readily available data, as well as tools which we can use to check for accessibility in our dataviz design decisions.
This event was sponsored by:
- Jumping Rivers
- National Innovation Centre for Data
- NU Solve
- Posit
- R Consortium
- Royal Statistical Society