Thinking

Cinematic Data Visualisation

82 chart types drawn the way film draws data. Each one named, coded and demonstrated live, classified by family, function, encoding channel and legibility tier.

Locate & Track

Radar sweep

rotating beam paints contacts that decay

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Wireframe terrain scan

a mesh drapes over relief as the sensor passes

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Topographic field

nested contours breathe as the field updates

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Orbital-mechanics plot

conic arcs and a burn window closing

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Trajectory arc

projected path with an impact bracket

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Flow map

directed arcs carry particles between nodes

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Choropleth

regions shift allegiance by fill

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Transit schematic

octilinear network, no true geography

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Dot-density swarm

population as scattered unit marks

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Pin map

a located thing, and nothing else

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Blip track

discrete returns with bearing and closing range

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Hex-bin overlay

density binned to a tessellating grid

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Cartogram

territory resized by what it holds

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Identify & Match

Bounding-box detection

boxes latch, label and release

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Candidate rack

a wall of possibles culled to one

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Match-percentage lock

a number climbing to certainty

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Optic-nerve scan

the eye rendered as terrain, not as a lens

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Sequence readout

base pairs streaming past a fixed cursor

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Waveform match

two traces sliding into phase

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Dossier card

a person compressed to a rectangle

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Measure & Monitor

Angular gauge cluster

needles against a swept arc

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Threshold bar

a value crossing a line that has consequences

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Vital-signs multi-trace

stacked traces sweeping right

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Sparkline rail

the most-borrowed real dataviz device in FUI

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Countdown timer

the only readout the audience always parses

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Level meter

a quantity that can run out

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Error bar

the admission of uncertainty

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Control chart

in-spec until it isn’t

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Battle-damage digital twin

the model bruises where the object did

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Progress crawl

the most abused type in the catalogue

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Candlestick tape

price prints right to left, body and wick

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Structure & Anatomy

Exploded view

parts retreat along their assembly axes

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Molecular lattice

structure as nodes held at fixed distance

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Treemap

area encodes size — a genuine encoding

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Dendrogram

authority drawn as depth

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Node-link graph

who touches whom

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Rotating 3D orbit

named by Coleran as the field’s worst trope

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Cutaway elevation

the skin removed, the plan kept

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Volumetric slice stack

a solid read one plane at a time

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Sunburst hierarchy

a system broken down ring by ring

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Chord matrix

who is talking to whom, and how much

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Volumetric point cloud

near returns bright, far ones sink

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Compare & Distribute

Sankey flow

quantity conserved across a branch

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Radar polygon

perceptually weak, visually complex — the FUI default

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Heat-map grid

a grid sorted by feel, not by value

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Bar rack

rare in FUI — and where it does appear, it is a set-build

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Scatter cloud

points finding their groups

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Histogram

shape of the spread

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Small-multiples wall

one chart repeated until it is a texture

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Unit grid

one mark per unit, counted down

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Attrition funnel

a population lost stage by stage

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Parallel coordinates

many subjects, one axis per trait

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Simulate & Predict

Deterministic-state scrub

past and future as one addressable strip

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Probability fan

certainty decaying with distance

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Branching timeline

a trunk, and the branches being pruned

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Precognition scrub

the gesture is the visualization

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Sensory-layer scrub

one memory, separable into channels

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Higher-dimensional unfold

a solid that will not stay a solid

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Simulation-vs-actual overlay

the model, and the world disagreeing with it

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Mission schedule

phases against a clock, with a now line

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Record & Retrieve

Physical card archive

retrieval as manual labour

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Terminal scrollback

text that is actually executable

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Spatial file browser

directory height encodes size — a real grammar

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Photo-navigation

cinema’s most durable interaction paradigm

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Ledger table

bureaucracy rendered legible

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Semiotic icon standard

a published grammar, not a per-film palette

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Wayfinding signifier

a world object doing UI work

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Atmosphere

Fuidget field

Noessel’s term — detail that encodes nothing

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Scan line

the display admitting it is a display

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Idle breathing loop

keeps a screen alive between plot beats

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Degradation layer

fidelity as biography

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Unreadable glyph block

meaning intuited without translation

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Reticle furniture

brackets that track nothing

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Boot crawl

the machine introducing itself

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Concept & Channel

Deliberation display

rendering a machine disagreeing with itself

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Agent affect state

system status carried by a face

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Sonification cue

the weld that makes a graphic legible

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Meta-perception filter

the frame becomes the character’s eye

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Acoustic substrate

physical particles as the display medium

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Scale ladder

the concept is the zoom, not the readout

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Non-diegetic locator

information for the audience only

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Chatter cloud

language sized by how often it recurs

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