For every chart you could ever want with a very easy-to-use API, highcharts (http://www.highcharts.com/) is your best friend. Free for personal use, inexpensive for commercial license. Highcharts will let you show as much or as little as you want. It's funny the author chose calorie per food portion for the example, I'm actually developing a web app that helps plan diets and I did exactly the same thing - remove labels, special effects, legends, etc. The result is magnificent, it really helps with both design and the usefulness of your data.
Data looks better naked
31–40 of 50 posts
Re: Data looks better naked
#32Not sure about lightening the labels and removing bolding. Contrast and readability goes down.
The idea is to keep focus on the data. The labels are reference when exact numbers are needed, but the data trend is king.
Re: Data looks better naked
#33Does anyone have any examples of great analytics dashboards(of any kind)? I've always been a bit unimpressed with most of them. Making the base presentation simple and clean while still allowing powerful filtering can be tricky.
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Re: Data looks better naked
#34That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk Any of you on HN that aren't familiar with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" should give it a read (and the rest of his books).
> and the rest of his books I find his books to be a bit too light on the content. All of them combined would've made a great book that would still be of a reasonable thickness, but he is self-published and he makes his living from lectures and book sales, so he's probably not too interested in that.
"The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" is not a howto guide. It's not a list of 101 tips and tricks for drawing charts, where one would wish for 200 tips instead. It's a framework, a theory, of how to think and reason about visualizing information. It is something you can take and apply in many different situations. Then the question really is, is there anything wrong with the theory it conveys?
Re: Data looks better naked
#35Not sure about lightening the labels and removing bolding. Contrast and readability goes down.
Readability may go down for the lightened elements but the point I took is that you can actually increase contrast by recognizing it as a two-way street. I.e., de-emphasizing less important details is perhaps even more effective at making the main emphasis (in this case the relative heights of the bars) stand out than trying to highlight it directly.
Don't get me wrong--I agree that the units/what-are-we-actually-measuring, 'Calories per 100g', should be darker in the final graph (though I don't think it needed to be bold). I also think the direct-labelling step, which obviates the lightening of the y-axis and over-shoots attenuation in favor of full, bright whiteness is an improvement.
Lightening may not be the best independent step but I think it's at least illustrative as an intermediate one.
Re: Data looks better naked
#36Agreed until it removed the numbers in y-axis. I want to see the scale, minimum, and maximum points in evenly spaced lines, whether logarithmic or linear space is used. This way, these details slightly disappear, or become harder to interpret.
And with those numbers gone, there's more room to mislead.
Re: Data looks better naked
#37Not sure about lightening the labels and removing bolding. Contrast and readability goes down.
The idea is to keep focus on the data. The labels are reference when exact numbers are needed, but the data trend is king.
The trend is meaningless without a reference. For example:
http://i.imgur.com/zXkkJw4.png
vs.
http://i.imgur.com/f6A84ds.png
It's the same exact data (which I made up, by the way) but the first one tells a very different story from the second.
Re: Data looks better naked
#38"You get used to it. I don’t even see the code anymore, all I see is blonde, redhead, brunette..." -That guy who betrayed Neo for a Juicy Steak.
Re: Data looks better naked
#39That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk Any of you on HN that aren't familiar with "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" should give it a read (and the rest of his books).
> and the rest of his books I find his books to be a bit too light on the content. All of them combined would've made a great book that would still be of a reasonable thickness, but he is self-published and he makes his living from lectures and book sales, so he's probably not too interested in that.
I own all of his books and have read through them several times. I see them as filling a role somewhere between a guide and a listing taken together. It's easy enough to get 95% of the practical value by just reading one of them, but the remaining 3 provide a number of examples which can help to provide a broad perspective on Tufte's ideas while inspiring your own interpretation of them.
If you just want to make better charts, buy, a from memory guess, Envisioning Information. It provides most of the basics of The Visual Display of Quantitative Information but develops the ideas a little further and provides better, more modern examples. If you think it's a cool topic then buy them all because they're all pretty nice books.
Re: Data looks better naked
#40For every chart you could ever want with a very easy-to-use API, highcharts ( http://www.highcharts.com/ ) is your best friend. Free for personal use, inexpensive for commercial license. Highcharts will let you show as much or as little as you want. It's funny the author chose calorie per food portion for the example, I'm actually developing a web app that helps plan diets and I did exactly the same thing - remove la…
Agreed. After evaluating a number of charting libraries, we purchased the "web app" license of highcharts.js and we've been pleased with its looks and ease-of-use. (in case it's not clear, we are a customer & not otherwise affiliated).