I’ve written before about how dual axis charts can mislead and confuse (here and here), but I’m adding another post to the series because recently the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service (ERS) published a chart that clearly shows how these…
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I’ve been thinking about how to make my chart legends more engaging. I prefer to directly label my data rather than using legends that are separated from the data, but when I need a legend—say, on a map or a…
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In Steve Wexler, Jeff Shaffer, and Andy Cotgreave’s great book, The Big Book of Dashboards, they define a data dashboard as: A visual display of data used to monitor conditions and/or facilitate understanding. I was reminded of their definition because…
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Last week, Samuel Parsons published an incredible Tableau dashboard and YouTube video on creating visual tables in Tableau. Sam’s “Super Advanced Tableau Tables” tutorial is, simply put, amazing. Sam shows you how to create 14(!) different visual elements in Tableau,…
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We all love the overtly wrong data visualization. The graph that is so clearly and obviously incorrect that it makes us laugh—and cry. Sometimes it doesn’t matter all that much, like this graph from a Milwaukee news channel. We all…
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Broadly, data visualization criticisms allow practitioners to further the field, explore new approaches and new dimensions, and understand what works and what doesn’t for different audiences, platforms, and content areas. But the current approach to data visualization critique doesn’t achieve…
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I’ve thought a lot about this connected scatterplot from the Washington Post’s Philip Bump over the previous few months. I’m not interested in the graph because the data are particularly interesting or I care so much about President Biden’s approval…
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A few months ago, I wrote a post about why and how to avoid dual axis charts. In that post, I focused exclusively on dual axis charts in which both series are lines, that is, showing changes over time. But there…
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Edith Young’s book, Color Scheme: An Irreverent History of Art and Pop Culture in Color Palettes, is a lovely tour through the colors, shades, tints, and tones across dozens of paintings over time. It’s a smart book of how artists…
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You might remember back in 2015 when Gregor Aisch and Amanda Cox at the New York Times’ published their 3D yield curve graphic. It’s one of the rare examples of a three-dimensional technique used well in data visualization. I distinctly…
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