en Introduction (pictograms)

Pictograms can be used to present "complex" facts quickly and understandably. Our pictograms therefore enrich your diagrams and dashboards with additional semantic elements. In the case of product groups, for example, the viewer can immediately recognize which products are involved. The quantification of important key figures in the form of pictograms also facilitates the comparison between different product groups.

When dealing with pictograms, it's very likely to get to know the concept of Isotype. Otto Neurath and his team investigated in Austria from the 1920s onwards how they could make social and economic facts accessible to the working population with simple pictograms, often accompanied by a lower level of education.

The so-called isotype developed from the Wiener Methode der Bildstatistik. This acronym is composed of International System of Typographic Picture Education. This was the first time that facts were conveyed in a more comprehensible, neutral and uniform way. The system includes a defined set of pictograms as well as a grammar. It determines the way the pictograms are combined.

In the following we describe the properties of the graphomate pictograms and the possibility to configure them in our user interface. This user interface is almost identical in all BI front ends - Power BI, Tableau, SAP Analytics Cloud and Lumira Designer. Formatting settings of graphomate pictograms can be stored on the graphomate server and used in other environments.