Building a glyph can be fun, restrictions and limitations can guide the design process. Data driven glyphs can especially result in unconventional encodings relying on feature processing leading to pattern recognitions in the visual perceptions process. The meaning conveyed will be relative to the viewer's environment. Since I don't have a car, I have experience using public transportation in different cities and I enjoy walking, biking and skateboarding. I thought exploring a commuting scores data set would be relatable to some extent, therefore it was interesting to map different types of transportation scores in different cities from which we also have the population count and square area.

On the level of an individual city, the glyph is simple to read, “the use of enclosure--surrounding a group of related elements with a visual element--is not a common technique in data visualization. This is remarkable given how powerful enclosure is” (Elijah Meeks - 2015). The set of three circles has colors that pop out and emphasize their categorical encoding of data type. Their sizes (magnitude) are mapped to the score making them comparable in size.

On a collective note, the Gestalt principles emphasize the contrast of the two extreme regions: Northeastern small cities with the most high scores and Southwestern large cities with the most low scores.The gestalt principles used in organizing these glyphs should facilitate the viewer’s comparison of different sets of values from the data set with their categorical attributes highlighted with colors.

Tools: Data Illustrator, Illustrator.