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VizBelle: A Design Space of Embellishments for Data Visualization

Visual embellishments, as a form of non-linguistic rhetorical figures, are used to help convey abstract concepts or attract readers' attention. Creating data visualizations with appropriate and visually pleasing embellishments is challenging since this process largely depends on the experience and the aesthetic taste of designers. To help facilitate designers in the ideation and creation process, we propose a design space, VizBelle, based on the analysis of 361 classified visualizations from online sources. VizBelle consists of four dimensions, namely, communication goal to fit user intention, object to select the target area, strategy and technique to offer potential approaches. We further provide a website to present detailed explanations and examples of various techniques. We conducted a within-subject study with 20 professional and amateur design enthusiasts to evaluate the effectiveness of our design space. Results show that our design space is illuminating and useful for designers to create data visualizations with embellishments.