Data visualization, I'm convinced, is more art than anything else. In this case, the medium is the data itself, and, if the data is rich enough (not difficult to find these days), it can be sculpted, mixed , patterned and placed in an endless number of ways. The artist's job is to navigate the possibilities that the data offers and find the one(s) that work: that communicate a message, that are beautiful and that , if you are really good, impress and inspire the audience. Like other artforms , data visualization has obvious techniques: color, shape, area, position and simple interactions and manipulations. Like other artforms there are styles and genres: network graphs, timelines, heatmaps, pie charts and word clouds. But I'm sure that the best visualizations in the times to come will succeed by conjuring new ways to look at data. Data visualization is fundamentally about being creative with the information and about the discovery process for both the artist and their audience.