All Items Tagged as chart design

Seth Godin Is Getting It…

From time to time, Seth Godin comes to visit our little field of information visualization, and I’m pleased to note that he is learning… Today’s post, “How to make graphs that work” is remarkably better than “The three laws of great graphs” or “How to make a PowerPoint chart”. Today he warns us against Excel … Read more

Just Another Stupid Bar Chart

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

Inconsequential Foreplay

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

Here's How the Unemployment Rate Sounds Like

Do you want to know how the unemployment rate sounds like? Copy this string: 65536,32768,16384,16384,16384,4096, 4096,2048,1024,1024,256,128,64,16,4,2 and paste it into here (right-click, past). Now the Dow Jones Index: 2,4,4,2,2,32,32,16,64,1024,2048,4096, 16384,65536,32768,16384 All together now: 65538,32772,16388,16386,16386, 4128,4128,2064,1088,1024,2304, 4224,16448,65552,32772,16386 This is fun. (Big gloomy smile.)

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.

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

How Many Computer Scientists Does It Take to Screw Up a Pie Chart?

You can add silly 3D effects to a pie chart, you can explode all the slices, you can compare multiple pie charts, you can use a legend instead of labeling the slices directly. This will probably render your graph useless, and make you look kind of dumb, but it is not the end of the … Read more

Chart-Making: Cures for Loss Aversion

Loss aversion – wrong chart example JunkCharts writes an interesting post on how loss aversion can happen in chart-making. The general concept of loss aversion tells us that “people strongly prefer avoiding losses than acquiring gains”. Translated to chart-making, it means that there is a “tendency to avoid losing data at any cost”. “To clarify, … Read more