Annotation Design

EuroVis 2026Computer Graphics Forum

Designing Annotations in Visualization

Considerations from Visualization Practitioners and Educators

Md Dilshadur Rahman, Devin Lange, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, and Paul Rosen

We interviewed ten visualization practitioners about how they design annotations and distilled their practice into six design considerations. Seven visualization educators then reflected on where each one holds and where it breaks down. They are heuristics for reflection, not rules. Below, each one is paired with published charts from The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist, with notes on where it shows up.

Read the paper See the examples Supplementary materials
Practitioners
10
Educators
7
Considerations
6
Examples
21

Six considerations

Sketches from Figure 1; takeaways from Section 4.3 of the paper.

    The examples

    Charts from a published collection of professional visualizations (Rahman, Quadri & Rosen, 2023). One chart can show several considerations.

    Consideration
    Publication

    Cite the paper

    Md Dilshadur Rahman, Devin Lange, Ghulam Jilani Quadri, and Paul Rosen. Designing Annotations in Visualization: Considerations from Visualization Practitioners and Educators. Computer Graphics Forum (EuroVis 2026), e70435, 2026. doi:10.1111/cgf.70435

    Open access under CC BY 4.0. Interview scripts, reflexive notes, the codebook, the COREQ checklist, and the edited quotes beside their unedited excerpts are in the supplementary materials.

    BibTeX 
    @article{rahman2026designing,
  author  = {Rahman, Md Dilshadur and Lange, Devin and
             Quadri, Ghulam Jilani and Rosen, Paul},
  title   = {Designing Annotations in Visualization:
             Considerations from Visualization
             Practitioners and Educators},
  journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
  year    = {2026},
  pages   = {e70435},
  doi     = {10.1111/cgf.70435}
}