Excerpt

The tenets unique to responsive design are nesting and typography. Intuitively, this makes sense: Nesting layout design certainly has an effect on visualization, but it is more a function of the container than the data itself. The same can be said of typography: Responsive type design is not limited to data visualization, but rather will affect all aspects of your product.

The tenets unique to responsive data visualization are grouping and layering, which are closely tied to the changing amounts of data you both:

• Receive on the input side
• Can display in the output context

The big secret is that the two are completely intertwined. There is absolutely no way to think about the responsive data visualization of a project without looking at the greater whole of responsive design. Your end users never need to know the term responsive (or design, or data, or visualization for that matter). All they care about is ease of access to your easy to understand content in their own context.

How, then, can these two topics help guide what you’ll be building for the screens that haven’t been invented yet? To determine that, it’s important to think first about how your inputs are likely to grow.