Graphoto: Aesthetically Pleasing Charts for Casual Information Visualization

Graphoto is a framework that automatically generates a photo or adjusts an existing one to match a line graph. Since aesthetics is an important element in visualizing personal data, Graphoto provides users with aesthetically pleasing displays for casual line graph information visualization. More specifically, after creating a line graph of the input data, a photo that resembles the input data on the line graph is selected from a photo archive. If a selected photo does not match the line graph, we deform the photo to match the line graph. Once the photo matches the line graph of the data, the line graph is superimposed on the photo using different colors and styles depending on the user’s artistic preferences. Additional embellishments are integrated into Graphoto, such as tick marks and text labels. We further present a user study to show the effectiveness of Graphoto in terms of data interpretation and aesthetics.