It is advised to eliminate any clutter in your data visualizations. This makes sense. Clutter distracts from the important information. All elements on you page require brain power from the reader. In other words, they take up cognitive load. As the Bible says: “If the trumpet sounds an indistinct call, who will get ready for battle?” (1 Corinthians 14:8). You message needs to be clear for other to understand. Clutter makes your messages unclear at first glance. Our goal is to keep the cognitive load low. Design to make it easy for the user.

If you’ve ever wondered what the point was or what the takeaway was after reading or hearing something, you’ve experienced excessive or extraneous load. To avoid this in your data visualizations, you’ll want to take a look at each of the elements and ask if they contribute enough to the purpose of your visualization. For example, you may want to get rid of cartoons or excessive use of color.

Which elements contribute to clutter? Consider the Gestalt Principles.

One suggestion is to make the visuals more orderly. For example, left-align text instead of center-align. The left margin of your few sentences are cleaner and form a vertical line instead of being staggered. Another suggestion is to allow for some “white space”. You don’t need to fill up the entire page or screen with data, text and graphs, and in fact it is best not to. If there is one thing in our visual that we want to stand out to the audience, make it unique or different in some way. A powerful way to do this is with color. Does your chart really need a border all around it? Does the chart need internal gridlines? Can we shorten the axis labels from January, February and March to Jan, Feb and Mar or even J, F and M and so on?