That's good stuff, Duncan. Could I also recommend - you probably know
this already - the books by Edward Tufte. "The Visual Display of
Quantitative Information" is, if I remember rightly, probably the most
useful on this topic, but there are several others, enumerated at
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/ .
There's a page, "Graphics and Web Design Based on Edward Tufte's
Principles", at
http://www.washington.edu/computing/training/560/zz-tufte.html . That
looks worth reading:
This is an outline of Edward Tufte's pioneering work on the use of
graphics to display quantitative information. It mainly consists of text
and ideas taken from his three books on the subject along with some
additional material of my own. This page is in text only format: in
order to understand the concepts you need to read the books because the
concepts cannot really be grasped without the illustrations, and current
video monitor technology is too low in resolution to do them justice.
[ Probably no longer true, but the book is quite old. ]
His work has been described as "a visual Strunk and White".
Also interesting, and from Tufte:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2.html . It's from "Wired",
and is entitled "PowerPoint Is Evil. Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts
Absolutely":
Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to
make us beautiful but didn't. Instead the drug had frequent, serious side
effects: It induced stupidity, turned everyone into bores, wasted time,
and degraded the quality and credibility of communication
Jocelyn Paine
http://www.j-paine.org
http://www.virtual-worlds.biz
+44 (0)7768 534 091
On Tue, 4 Jan 2005, Duncan Williamson wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> Following an online discussion elsewhere, I am happy to announce the
> publication of another excellent resource from www.duncanwil.co.uk on the
> subject of graphs, charts and tabular presentation. The object of this file
> is to point out, using specific examples
>
> where fundamental errors have been made
> my analysis of those mistakes and
> my suggestions of how to correct them
>
> Although this file is only 5 days old, it is already in its second edition
> as I have now more clearly labelled the errors in an unmistakable way since
> the first edition had one or two readers who could neither see the errors
> nor their importance.
>
> Just go to http://www.duncanwil.co.uk/pdfs.html and click on the third link
> under Charting on the menu.
>
> Please let me have any feedback as usual.
>
> Happy new year to you all.
>
> Duncan Williamson
>
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