Simplicity is a data visualization best friend
Incremental Improvements #18: Chart junk
Published in
4 min readSep 21, 2021
Simplicity is not a matter of personal preferences but a necessity due to our limited perception capabilities. Therefore everything which doesn’t help us understand the data is rubbish. There is even a term for that — a chart junk.
If you’re not familiar with the chart junk I recommend the article by Edward Tufte, who created this term.
We can clutter our charts in numerous ways but mainly is due to excessive color usage and ornaments. In the selected chart we have both of those elements. I encourage you to take a look at the chart below and try to figure out what is wrong with it.
Original DataViz
Good data visualization solutions✔️
Elements that work in this chart
- Simplifying numbers — and adjusting the unit so the differences in the cost are easy to spot. I would just limit the number of decimal points to one for both the cost and the percent of the total. This way, numbers…
