Semiology of Graphics

Jacques Bertin’s 1967 Sémiologie Graphique is the theoretical foundation of modern visualization. It systematically classified the “visual variables” — position, size, shape, value, color, orientation, and texture — and described which data types (nominal, ordinal, quantitative) each variable could effectively encode.

Bertin’s framework gave designers a rigorous vocabulary for discussing why one chart works better than another. His visual variables remain the basis of every modern visualization grammar, from Wilkinson’s Grammar of Graphics to Vega-Lite.

The book also pioneered the concept of “reorderable matrices” — the idea that rearranging rows and columns of a data table could reveal patterns. This concept underlies modern techniques like seriation, heatmap clustering, and parallel coordinates reordering.