
Data looks better naked - chethiya
http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-naked/
======
CSDude
Agreed 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.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The horizontal lines and y-axis labels were particularly helpful for comparing
non-adjacent bars.

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chaz
The original source with blog post: [http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-
looks-better-naked/](http://darkhorseanalytics.com/blog/data-looks-better-
naked/)

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pvnick
For every chart you could ever want with a very easy-to-use API, highcharts
([http://www.highcharts.com/](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.

~~~
soneca
Out of topic, but counting calories don't mean squad for a diet. It is a myth.
Read [http://garytaubes.com/](http://garytaubes.com/) for a good research on
this.

Counting carbs is what is important. Low Carb, High Fat is what science tells
you should do to loose wait. Using thermodynamics to understand our biology is
useless.

EDIT for on topic add: Useless data is useless, naked or not. They should have
chosen a better example.

~~~
meowface
Nutrition science is highly contested; for every report or paper that claims
one thing, another will completely refute it.

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cschmidt
That's just following Edward Tufte's maxim to minimize chart junk.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartjunk](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).

~~~
eps
> 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.

~~~
MJR
His books were written over 24 years so they idea of writing one great book is
just not a practical one. He made his living as a professor not simply self-
publishing, lectures and book sales. For someone who evangelizes effective
presentation of information, creating a CliffsNotes or Nutshell version just
completely misses the point of his work.

~~~
phren0logy
I can't agree. The rest of those books contain roughly the same amount of
actual information as his first. I went to his workshop, in which he seemed to
be showing as much restraint as he could to not talk exclusively about his
lawn sculptures.

Tufte has some great ideas, but would benefit from a ruthless editor. As a guy
who's self-published, he does not get the benefit of that kind of feedback.

------
vpj
They could have used horizontal bars instead of vertical. It takes up much
less space and easier to place the labels. This GIF shows a similar animation,
but with a 90 degree rotation and a little more information.

[http://blog.bissantz.com/images/2008/01/tod_der_businessgraf...](http://blog.bissantz.com/images/2008/01/tod_der_businessgrafiken_v2.gif)

I wonder why they add the table grid at the end. A grid could have been useful
if there were a lot of columns, but certainly not in this case.

This is a similar idea I was working on [http://vpj.svbtle.com/variable-
length-underlining-to-help-se...](http://vpj.svbtle.com/variable-length-
underlining-to-help-see-data-in-a-glance)

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vampirechicken
Stop using gray text on a white background.

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joliv
Not sure about lightening the labels and removing bolding. Contrast and
readability goes down.

~~~
pmahoney
The idea is to keep focus on the data. The labels are reference when exact
numbers are needed, but the data trend is king.

~~~
rcfox
The trend is meaningless without a reference. For example:

[http://i.imgur.com/zXkkJw4.png](http://i.imgur.com/zXkkJw4.png)

vs.

[http://i.imgur.com/f6A84ds.png](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.

~~~
pmahoney
This has nothing to do with putting labels in bold or not, unless I
misunderstood?

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aeon10
Anybody has good resources (preferably free) on creating online
visualizations. Not links to the d3.js documentation but good tutorials
creating visualizations you often use on the internet. Like creating your own
cool dashboard and stuff like that.

~~~
stared
Forget documentation, look at tutorials (list here:
[https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Tutorials](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Tutorials),
for example look at this one:
[http://vogievetsky.github.io/IntroD3/](http://vogievetsky.github.io/IntroD3/)).

And later - look at examples
([https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery](https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery)
or
[http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html](http://christopheviau.com/d3list/gallery.html)).
IMHO it is the best way to learn D3.js and data vis in general.

Some other links:
[https://delicious.com/stared/d3js](https://delicious.com/stared/d3js)

------
struct
Good analysis here: [http://betterposters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/link-roundup-
for...](http://betterposters.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/link-roundup-for-
september-2013.html)

If you don't have the y-axis, then a) there's no point in having it as a graph
and b) there's the possibility for manipulative display.

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frakkingcylons
This is kind of neat from a graphical design perspective, but it doesn't
actually relate minimalistic chart design to more informative analytics in any
meaningful manner. A concise, well-written blog post would do much more (than
a short, hasty animation) to inform people.

~~~
Cthulhu_
Actually pretty sure these are all images taken from a blog posted earlier on
HN.

edit: Chaz pointed the original out.

~~~
chethiya
Got the gif from a friend. Thanks for point out the original blog post. Just
wanted to share the difference between having high redundancy vs less
redundancy in visualizations.

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jasonkostempski
Turn it sideways. Remove the bars.

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nicklovescode
Does 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.

~~~
JasonCEC
My company makes analytics dashboards for Statistical Quality Control and
Flavor profiling of artisan products... I think it's pretty good with its
filtering options and the like. Link to our first tutorial here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHbNcrobwc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvHbNcrobwc)

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thekaleb
This is old and does not really demonstrate the importance like a study would.

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wreegab
I wish I hadn't seen that potato chips have that much more calories than
pizza.

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nobody_nowhere
Edward Tufte to the rescue!

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drakaal
"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.

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fogleman
Takeaway: I should eat more chili dogs.

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jimmaswell
There was nothing wrong with that chart in the first place. What a pointless
optimization.

~~~
mhurron
Well it was butt ugly. Personally I think they went too far in minimizing the
look but that's just me.

But it did start off seriously ugly, but then again, it was made to be. I
guess it was something of a straw graph, no one would really make a graphic
like that.

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John_W_
somebody got good websites on best practice visualization?

~~~
reyan
This (rather old) paper is still worth reading: Cleveland, W. S. (1984),
"Graphical Perception and Graphical Methods for Analyzing Scientific Data"

[http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i247/f05/readings/Clevel...](http://courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i247/f05/readings/Cleveland_GraphicalPerception_Science85.pdf)

