Let’s assume that a bad chart is a chart that breaks basic perceptual laws, contains too much fluff, do not respect data relationships and do not clearly answer the underlying question (if you can find one). Why do people make such charts? Below you can find some
Read more →(…) On the top of the mountain was a plain. There stood an old stone house, and in front of the house lay a great fish-pond, but behind it was a dark forest. He saw neither men nor animals, everything was quiet; only the wind rustled among the trees, and
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Here is an interesting technique: using two y-axis to display the same data at different resolutions. Yellow (BMI) and blue (Weight) lines should overlap (there is a one-to-one correspondence between BMI and Weight for a given height), but they don’t because they are using a higher resolution
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Are you sure you can recognize an Excel chart from miles away? I thought that too. Then I started playing with some data visualization historical milestones and now I’m not so sure. Trying to recreate these charts in Excel is a great way to improve your Excel skills
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We know how popular pie charts are in business presentations, but pie charts and infographics is a marriage made in heaven. Let me share with you 16 cool ideas to add pie charts to your next infographic. I’ll add a brief comment to tell you what makes each unique
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I refuse to believe that a moderately clever person makes a 3D chart to get better insights from the data. The real reasons behind this behavior have nothing to do with data visualization, and impression management is one of them. Maybe this can be confirmed by research
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Do you know that, according to Amazon, Tufte’s Envisioning Information is a best seller book in Design and Decorative Arts? This man fights all his life against decoration and one of his best books ends up on the Decorative Arts category? Life (or Amazon) does have a twisted
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There are many approaches to data visualization. Take well-know authors like Tufte, Cleveland, Ware, Few, Bertin or McCandless. There is some overlap, but they all approach data visualization from a different angle. That’s great news for you: this means that you can come up with a unique
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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
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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
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