59 Kellogg Insight This boom has led to some rules about how to best present your data. Yet Franconeri, who also has a courtesy appointment at Kellogg, says far too few people learn those rules. And it comes at a cost: bad visualizations. “If you do it wrong, it’s a disaster,” he says. “It can be complete spaghetti.” Boom in Visualizations The way you display your data depends on the story you want that data to tell. So it follows that the people at the forefront of data visualization today are trained storytellers. “The folks who are doing the most interesting work on the storytelling front are journalists,” Franconeri says. They are the people whose job it is to take complex ideas and distill them in digestible, memorable ways. Take, for example, this interactive graphic that looks at how the recession shaped the economy and this one that looks at how the yield curve pre - dicts economic growth . In both, from The New York Times , the viewer is guided through several sets of related data with an animation that causes one visualization to flow into another (either by scrolling or clicking). “It’s taking a big complex data set and guiding people through one snap - shot at a time so that they understand the big picture through a guided tour,” Franconeri says. And all the rules that apply to good journalistic visualizations also apply to the business world. “Nobody ever gets taught these rules. You take writing classes in college. You don’t take a graphical-communication class,” he says. Yet, “this is Based on insights from Steve Franconeri