Aesthetics for Communicative Visualization: a Brief Review

We present a brief and somewhat selective review of research on the applied value of aesthetics for communicative visualization. Because aesthetics research in the field of visualization is relatively new, we survey aesthetics research in closely related fields, including psychology, graphic design, and marketing. Because of space limitations, we constrain our discussion of marketing research and omit any examination of related work from human-computer interaction researchers. We conclude with implications for communicative visualization practitioners and researchers, discussing the value of aesthetics and how to achieve it, as well as the need for research on longer-term aesthetic impacts on viewers.