science and design are both about communication

Mike Dickison’s blog Pictures of Numbers is fab. It’s all about clear, simple, effective data visualisation for scientists. Three posts that I thought were particularly useful were:

Better Axes: improving readability, increasing the information content and decreasing the clutter in your graphs.

Fixing Excel’s Charts: Surgery for the annoying defaults that Excel has, and how you can actually get an effective and high-impact piece of data presentation out of the poor maligned piece of microsoftery. [I spent a fair bit of time mucking about with building custom templates for graphs while I was writing my thesis, and they're really worth the time investment.]

Maps for Scientists: Two posts, one about choosing maps and one about using them. Both sensible and aimed at presenting and highlighting the right types of geographical information.

His tip list is also a good reference, as are the handouts on his workshops & handouts pages. 

My colleagues are probably bored to tears when I bang on about design and science, so it is great to see a kindred scientist out there.