Clay Johnson, author of The Information Diet wrote on Twitter: Redistricting should be done with data & open source software, not by humans. Let me be completely honest: I don’t like golden calves and I can spot two in this single sentence: technology and data. Yes, redistricting should be done with data and technology, but the … Read more
Corporate annual reports and the Wikipedia are two great resources to find really bad charts. We can’t do much about corporate reports, but we can actually change the Wikipedia articles. So, here is an assignment for you: find a bad chart and replace it with one that actually makes sense from a data visualization point … Read more
The French call it l’air du temps, the spirit of the times. You breathe it, you wear it, you eat it. You can’t escape it. Over the last 20 years, the spirit of our times gave us things like: Glossy Pie Chart McMansion BMW X6 Jeremy Clarkson: “The X6 was conceived at a time … Read more
A while ago something broke inside me. My deepest held beliefs were shattered. I started drinking again. Absinthe. I love absinthe. 69% ABV. It started when I saw it. A glorious pie chart displaying growth rates. Growth! At first, I couldn’t believe it. I took off my glasses. Yes, growth rates. In a pie chart. I had … Read more
We often learn a lot more from bad examples than from the good ones. So, here is a really bad one (you can find many examples like this in corporate annual reports…). So, what’s wrong here? What do they want to say? If you don’t know what to say, you probably should keep your mouth … Read more
There are so many bad charts published every single day that redesigning some of them would be a full time job. Many are involuntarily funny. And there are some dangerous and stupid ones. I live in Portugal, a small country that only gets international press coverage when something goes wrong. Like now. Public debt is … Read more
Microsoft Office Online Training is the perfect example of what you should not learn about charts and data visualization.
You know, I would really love to quit my day job and spend my time learning about information visualization, write about it, help people understand why good information visualization skills are relevant for their business. Now, I could try to speed up things by selling some crappy affiliate products, fill up the blog with Google … Read more
Human creativity is virtually limitless. But: You don’t vary color by data point. You don’t force the eyes to a pendular movement if you can avoid it. You don’t use a legend when you can use axis labels. You can’t have a residual category that large. Bloggers don’t seem to learn, even with a good teacher. … Read more
Nathan discusses this chart. He says: I know a lot of you don’t like bubbles in your viz, but this one works for me. Jon Peltier, in the comments, argues that: Sets of bars would have been more effective. Tim adds the definitive argument: “Always using bar charts is like always using missionary position. It … Read more