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I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

dougmacdowell.com

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Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#61

Post by dougdude3339 »

Daub wrote: post #22

I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.

I've taught digital art classes too. I was pleasantly surprised at a writing assignment where most students (un-prompted) turned in a hand-written response.

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#62

Post by 2b3a51 »

The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion.

My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches.

I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.

As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.

https://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/example/

Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#63

Post by khoitsma »

otherme123 wrote: post #5
dougdude3339 wrote: post #2

What's been more interesting to me lately than using software to design data visualizations is learning to draw data by hand. It's a time consuming process but incredibly rewarding. The feeling of erasing graphite to reveal clean, crisp lines is something that software cannot recreate.

What do you use to erase pencil? The words "Using an eraser and a light touch" suggest a gum or a vynil eraser. I make a ball with the kneaded eraser and roll it with the palm against the paper.

I use the Pentel Hi-Polymer eraser. Minimal abrasion of the paper, clean removal of graphite.

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#64

Post by projektfu »

And remember that perfection is the enemy of the good. I needed a little bit of drafting to design a sun room and started looking at software options. I didn't immediately like anything so I grabbed a ruler and a piece of paper and drew what I wanted pretty quickly using the standard 1/4"=1' scale. Precision is actually unimportant, everything will need to be fitted by the builder in the end, even if an architect measured and drew everything in AutoCAD/Revit. But very quickly you can get good results without even a drafting table and T-square. I have the T-square and triangles, but didn't have the space to work with them, and I'm happy enough with the result.

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#65

Post by jakeydus »

dolmen wrote: post #39
jinnyto wrote: post #23

Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship. Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports,…

Thanks for the link to this archive. A very welcome contribution very a propos in relation to the article. An amateur of old hand drawn maps (Michelin road, and older).

If you enjoyed this I'd highly recommend checking out A Semiology of Graphics[0]. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned in the article, but I recognize the article was less about types of data visualization than it was about how we create data vis.

[0]: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology_of_Graphics.h...

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#66

Post by jakeydus »

rafterydj wrote: post #44
pram wrote: post #6

They look really good. I really enjoy looking at midcentury engineering charts/diagrams and stuff like jeppesen charts. NASA has a lot of good ones. The way the text looks, the line economy, the general aesthetic. Well worth the effort imo!

I'm glad I'm not the only who seemingly has a taste for "older" diagrams from that period. It makes me think of the same aesthetic roots of what's now called "cassette futurism" or "NASA-punk". Older engineering charts really feel like there was more care and thought put into each line or facet, even though I'm sure it's a trick of time.

I was a big fan of two fonts (Draft Paper and Parts List) by Beth Matthews [0] that call back to this era, you might enjoy them as well.

[0]: https://www.bethmathews.com/shop/partslistdraftpaperfontbund...

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#67

Post by ano-ther »

Very nice and a beautiful result.

Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.

What do you use?

Re: I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

#68

Post by rickydroll »

lemonberry wrote: post #53
mauvehaus wrote: post #32

I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand. One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer. I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen…

I'm old enough that I took drafting in 7th grade. One tip I remember is to turn the pencil slightly as you use it. I think this was to help maintain the pencil's shape, but there my be other less obvious reasons. I took woodshop too. The shop teacher seemed to enjoy scaring us with stories of the students that goofed off in shop to horrific consequences. That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors…

> That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.

That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road on a hill covered in corn snow without walking the path first to make sure you can get out or get back up. 4: When looking for a winter campsite for your Boy Scout troop, tell your parents where you're going.

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