When you are designing your data visualizations, you will benefit yourself and your audience if you use techniques that focus attention on what’s important. The first thing to consider is preattentive attributes. We can use the knowledge of preattentive attributes to focus the attention of our audience to the elements we want them to focus on.

When we look at a chart or graph our eyes transfer the information to our brains. Within our brain there are three types of memory that are important to understand when we design our visual communications: iconic memory, short-term memory and long-term memory.

Iconic memory is very very fast.