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Thursday Mar 23, 2006

Circles v. Squares

For those of you who are big fans of circles (me! me!), there's a new treemap visualization on the street: "Circular" Treemaps. They look more organic than Ben Shneiderman's original Treemap visualizations.

Circles:

v. Squares:

found via information aesthetics

Posted by Joan Dimicco in "Visualization" | Comments[4]

Comments:

It seems that rectangular treemaps have a distinct advantage in that you can divide a rectangle into sub-rectangles, with a circular treemap, it is hard (well,impossible) to divide a circle into two parts, each being a small circle.

Posted by Paul on March 23, 2006 at 08:45 AM PST #

I'm with Paul here. The circular treemaps waste space, which means that the whole is a different size than the sum of its parts. In contrast, the classic square treemap (ooh, I drew that one on the bottom!) actually guarantees that if X is a child of Y and has 37% of its size, then it will take up 37% of Y's area. You can't dense-pack a circle, so you can't make that guarantee that about circle treemaps. Now, Voronoi treemaps are a new kettle of fish.

Posted by Danyel Fisher on May 02, 2006 at 12:07 PM PDT #

Yea, I am realizing that I'm easily persuaded by pretty colors. The pink and grey are so nice! But you are right, the parts do not add up to the whole, which seems like a very bad idea in information visualization. Did you see the <a href="http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1124772.1124851&coll=portal &dl=ACM&type=series&idx=1124772&part=Proceedings&WantType=Pr oceedings&title=Conference%20on%20Human%20Factors%20in%20Computing%20Systems &CFID=75104365&CFTOKEN=81157299">"circle packing" treemap talk at CHI? When I saw those horrible colors I began to see the light.

Posted by joandimicco on May 03, 2006 at 03:01 PM PDT #

Joan, It sounds like color is the high-order-bit here, and not the tree layout. Which isn't necessarily bad, but is a fair warning to those of us designing visualizations. Especially those of us with poor color sense, as I often have...

Posted by Danyel Fisher on May 06, 2006 at 11:02 PM PDT #

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