When you sit down to write an AV, you will face a number of important decisions: Do you write it in Java, or C, or some other language? Do you use one of the many available Toolkits? Do you make it web-based or executable? Do you even want to make a visualization? Maybe a presentation would actually be better for your purpose.

The choices you make will impact the ease of implementation, your ability to maintain the project, and perhaps most importantly, the educational value of your visualization. We've combed through many existing visualizations and have tried to identify features which assist the developer, the educator, or the learner (with focus on the latter two). This list represents our attempt to distill these features into design principles for creating "good" visualizations, starting with the most important and working towards the "nice to have".