Solid, outlined, hatched: How visual consistency helps better understand reports, presentations and dashboards

Rolf Hichert and Jürgen Faisst’s Solid, Outlined, Hatched is an incredibly practical book about visual consistency that helps readers better understand reports, presentations and dashboards.

It’s a book about more and more recognizable black-and-white reports with a bit of red and greenish colors to highlight important variances. I believe that one of the most important questions in data visualization is about colors. What colors do we need? How many colors do we need? Solid, Outlined, Hatched is one of the few important books about colors in data visualization that proves the answer is “not many, just a few“.

But this book is much more than just about colors. It explains that “business identity” is not equal to business intelligence. It shows how standardization is beneficial for BI reporting.

The book will help you in better understanding International Business Communication Standards and provides additional recommendations beyond the latest version of the standards. I highly recommend this book to anyone who creates business reports or software for creating them. As a data analyst, report developer, BI tools developer, read the book to understand how to build better reports, presentations and dashboards that convey clear messages and provide enough details to prove the point.

Standardization is not a panacea; there are industry- or even company-specific business processes that may benefit from highly customized data visualizations, but the majority of reports common to any company (sales reports, financial statements) have nothing special that may need deep customization. On the contrary, such reports benefit from standardization.

IBCS is much more than just about colors. As IBCS becomes more popular, you might see phrases like “this is my IBCS visualization” here and there. But simply using a bit of green and red for variances has nothing to do with what IBCS really is. It’s about conveying a message, applying semantic notation, increasing information density, evaluating visual integrity, choosing proper visualizations, avoiding clutter, and organizing content (see the standards). It’s about captions and labels, time and scenario comparisons, highlighting what is important, tables, font sizes, measures and scales, templates, notation manuals, and real-life examples (see the book).

Likely, it’s about the future of data visualization in your organization, mostly based on international standards (maybe even on the future ISO Standard notation for business reports), notation manuals, and templates.