Irregular Time Series? No. Oversampling.

If you are a market researcher, and you want to make sure that you get more reliable results for a subgroup in a survey, what do you do? You must increase the overall sample size (and spend a lot of money), right? Actually, you don’t. You can oversample that group only, and then weight it … 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-piechartOver 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.

Read moreWill Traditional Charts Survive?

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

Get a Clown Suit, Instead

Why do people insist on using “professional looking charts” in their presentations? If I wanted to divert the audience’s attention from the data, I would get a professional clown suit, instead. I would look professional. Not exactly the professional-looking presenter people expect in a corporate environment, but nevertheless a professional. Meet professional-looking Mr. and Mrs. … 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

Can You See the Chart Under the Notes?

Annotating your chart helps your audience to understand the reasons behind some patterns or outliers. But, please, please, don’t bury the data under boxes and arrows and busy grid lines, like this one on the right does (from WTRG Economics). How can you improve a chart like this? First of all, the series must be … Read more