Categorized Posts

God and Moses? The Differences Between Edward Tufte and Stephen Few

I have a confession to make: my past is paved with chart-making sins, including some capital ones (yes, 3D pie charts, too). But years ago I saw the light in Edward Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information and since then I’ve been avoiding eye-candy temptations. Now I do my best to pursuit the path … Read more

Focus + Context (a Bar Chart Is Not a Skyscraper)

Textures. 3D. Pie charts. Primary colors. Trends hidden behind labels. Backgrounds. Pie charts again. Clear signs of a bad chart, right? Right. It is so easy to spot a badly designed chart that you can use a computer to do it. Don’t waste your time. Let’s stop discussing the obviously wrong and start discussing the … Read more

Will Traditional Charts Survive?

No, traditional charts are useless in our complex world

playfair-piechart Over the next 25 years, we will need new visualization tools to replace traditional charts.

As you know, line, bar and even pie charts first appeared 200 years ago, with William Playfair, and perhaps until 25 years ago, they were good enough helping us to make sense of our data. Before computers, they were crafted by graphic designers. Kids in schools drew them using millimetric paper.

Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics were the most popular charting tools in the early days of personal computers. With those tools (and later, with Excel), the charting landscape changed forever. Some charts vanished, either because they weren’t simple enough and/or didn’t make it into the chart gallery (I miss trilinear plots – yes, Jon, I know how to create them in Excel, but still…), while others should never have been allowed into that gallery.

Black & White Charts

Now is the winter of our discontent Made glorious summer by this sun of York; And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house In the deep bosom of the ocean buried. By the way, black & white is also a great starting point for better charts.

Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was here in Lisbon today, for one of his remarkable presentations. It seems that almost no one in the room new about his TED talks and, of course, everyone loved his charts. He gave his presentation in Portuguese, so some extra points there too… If you just return to planet Earth and don’t … Read more

Can Edward Tufte Do Business Charts?

1. Tufte, the Father of Eye-Candy Charts Tufte’s The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, published in 1983, is probably the most influential book in the history of data visualization, and it is likely to remain so for some more time. In his book, Tufte outlines for the first time a consistent theory of how a … Read more

Is Your Chart Really Answering Your Question?

We are so busy creating sexy charts to illustrate some random data that we often forget to check if our chart really answers the question. Heck, most of the times we don’t even have one. Chart first, ask questions later. One of the major differences between tables and charts is this: a tables says “here … Read more

Data Visualization: Who Needs a Reality Check?

According to Stephen Few, the founders of Tableau Software made some assumptions about visual analytics’ adoption that we can summarize in a single sentence: analysts want to find hidden insights in large and complex data sets using new visual paradigms. Later on, they discovered that these assumptions were somewhat flawed, and that what people really … Read more

14 Misconceptions About Charts and Graphs

Many misconceptions plague the field on information visualization. This post lists some of them and tells you how to remove those misconceptions.

Spending Time Deciphering Time Utilization Charts

I really dislike stacked bar charts… Let’s see a new bad example. Steve Rubel shares with us how he spent his time online (update: page no longer available) over the last two weeks. He uses the Firefox add-on PageAddict to monitor the time. He writes: As you can see almost all of my time online … Read more