Don't Do Such Things: Dogmatic Advice in DataViz

PolicyViz Newsletter #60

A little over a year ago, I sent out a newsletter post (and later posted on my site) about making graph legends more engaging. I pointed to a clever version in one of Hans Rosling’s famous bubble charts and a few graphs that incorporated icons directly into the legend.

Someone responded to that post with the comment below (I’ve omitted text that obviously identifies the original author):

That's absolutely just no good approach at all! The legend should be as neutral as possible.

You should make your graphic interesting NOT the legend!….Don't do such things. The legend has to be as clear as possible and is absolutely no illustration. It is the reference to understand everything and any distraction has to be avoided completely.

Put the visual storytelling inside the graphic but beware of the legend.

If you know something about infographics and how to do them right, you would never propose such things... ….

This comment has stuck with me. I don’t know why, exactly. Maybe because the author is so emphatic about their perspective on what does and what does not make a graph “interesting.”

I started my data visualization career after attending an Edward Tufte workshop (side note: it’s interesting to me how fewer and fewer people know of Tufte, but that’s for another time). Tufte’s approach to data visualization is super dogmatic: What he says goes and if you stray from that approach—make pie charts or add ornaments or icons to your charts—you’re objectively doing it wrong.

Coming out of Tufte’s class, I approach data visualization in some of the same dogmatic ways—no pie charts, no extraneous text or lines or icons. But over time, my perspective—and it feels much (but clearly not all)—of the field has changed. We pay attention to what attracts and keeps attention; how some less-familiar graphs can do a better job at showing the data; and how data can be, well fun. There are so many creative and expressive ways to communicate your data that it seems a shame to dictate what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ or which parts of your visualizations should or should not be interesting.

This isn’t to say there are some basic guidelines we should follow—especially as we start out in our own data visualization journeys exploring our own preferences and aesthetic judgements. Heck, I’ve written books on data visualization best practices! But arguing that some technique—especially a creative technique—is an absolute “never!” or “wrong!” is, well, uh, wrong (haha, sorry).

Anyways, yeah, just a bit of a stream of consciousness this week. I guess it’s on my mind because Zach Bowders and I talk a bit about inspiration and plagiarism in the current episode of the podcast—check it out if you have time.

Let me know what topics you’re thinking about these days! I’m always looking for fun things to think and write about.

Thanks again,

Jon

More Flourish Learning

I’ve been using Flourish more and more over the past few weeks and while I’ve come to really like the tool, there are some things that give me headaches or are hard to find. So, I’ve started doing more Flourish step-by-step videos on my YouTube channel. If you’d like to learn how to create engaging and interactive data visualizations without code, Flourish might be for you!

Data Visualization Style Guides

For the last couple of years, I’ve been meeting pretty regularly with Max Graze, Amy Cesal, and Alan Wilson to explore and better understand data visualization style guides. There’s a lot to learn here about best practices, templates, and organizational principles! We even created our own website where you can explore the library of style guides we’ve collected over the years. Today, we’re publishing a new series on that site where we each review just one little part of different style guides. We plan to keep this up as long as it’s fun. I think you’ll learn something from these posts and the site as a whole, so check it out!

Things I’m Reading & Watching

Books

• Indigenous Statistics by Maggie Walter and Chris Anderson

• The Boys in the Boat: Nine Americans and Their Epic Quest for Gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Daniel James Brown

• The Pink and Blue Project, by JeongMee Yoon

Legos

• Milky Way. May look boring, but one of the most fun, meditative builds I’ve ever done!

• Sesame Street. Maybe the best build I’ve done in a while!

• Nightmare Before Christmas LEGO set. I have it. It’s not opened. I don’t have anywhere to put it!!!

TV, Movies, Music, and Miscellaneous

• Bad Monkey, Hulu

• Sunny, AppleTV

• Pearl Jam, all of it

• Dark Matter, AppleTV

Note: As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.

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