
Seth's Blog: How to make graphs that work - GVRV
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/07/how-to-make-graphs-that-work.html
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baha_man
"First, programmers don't often have a lot of taste. The fonts [in Excel and
Powerpoint] are flaccid, the defaults are wan and uninspiring. There's no
sophistication."

The programmers working on the latest version of Excel are about as likely to
choose the fonts as they are to design the advertising campaign for it.

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access_denied
Godin didn't mean "programmers", he did mean "corporate drones". But that's
his target audience. So he writes "programmers" to give his audience somebody
to distinguish themselves a bit, like "if you make awesome presentations you
are not so un-hip like those".

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baha_man
"Godin didn't mean "programmers", he did mean "corporate drones"."

Well, I think you're giving him too much credit, I took his words at face
value and I think that he meant exactly what he said.

If you're right, though, what exactly is his point? That you should draw your
graphs by hand? Use an _unpopular_ spreadsheet? That you should change the
font etc. from the default, which is a deliberately safe choice? What makes
him think that a 'marketer' can produce a more appealing graph than a
'corporate drone' graphic designer?

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access_denied
"If you're right, though, what exactly is his point?"

How does the overall point of the paragraph / article change when we change
the job title of the people who create the templates?

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kurtosis
Whoa - he didn't put a time scale or units on his graph are we looking at one
month, one year, or 50 years?

His graph definitely looks more attractive but I would add that it's very
important to put scales and units on your graph. And don't trick people by
playing with the units. Make sure that they are meaningful.

This is not one of those rules you want to break.

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iamwil
I can think of two reasons for doing that:

1) You're trying to deceive your audience. It's one of the many ways covered
in the classic, "How to lie with statistics"

2) You're presenting secret data. You're allowed to show the trends, but not
any of the actual units.

Also, I thought the title on this graph was misleading. it said "Rapid
Growth", and certainly, it was going up, but rapid compared to what? You
always want to be asking yourself, "compared to what?" when you're looking at
visualizations.

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skermes
Off the top of my head, I can think of way more than "four reasons I can
imagine [I] would want to show someone a graph." How about "look at this
interesting pattern in the data," or "look how data set foo correlates with
data set bar?" Neither of those fall under "help me figure it out", and
they're both telling at least as much of a story as "everything is going
great".

Also, while his graph is somewhat more pleasing to my eyes than the original,
it still doesn't tell me what I really want to know about that data. I have
two questions about that line: what happened with that first really big spike,
and does he think that the two similarly-shaped regions that follow it
represent the beginning of a cycle that we might see again. His graph is
called "Rapid Traffic Growth", but I think there's a more interesting story in
there.

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omouse
It might be worth breaking the graph into 3 sections or somehow highlighting
those interesting points.

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credo
One of his rules says "Good results should go up on the Y axis. This means
that if you're charting weight loss, don't chart "how much I weigh" because
good results would go down. Instead, chart "percentage of goal" or "how much I
lost." "

A graph that needs to track weight loss should chart weight loss, but imo it
isn't a good idea to say that good results should always go up on the y axis.

If I were interested in tracking weight, I'd rather have a graph track the
actual "weight" instead of some other convoluted metric like "how much I
lost". Weight going up may be a "bad" result for some users and it may be a
"good" result for other users. So it wouldn't make sense for a weight-tracking
for a graph to categorize it as good or bad

[http://blog.CascadeSoft.net/2009/07/05/product-ui-design-
why...](http://blog.CascadeSoft.net/2009/07/05/product-ui-design-why-the-
green-up-arrow-isn’t-always-good/) also addresses this topic.

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ojbyrne
He left out "Read Tufte."

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Alex3917
Probably because what he is saying in this post doesn't align well with Tufte.

The premise of Tufte, or at least his aesthetic taste, is that graphs should
be as information-dense as possible. The premise of Seth's post is that the
only point of a graph is to get someone to understand the emotional impact of
an idea. So instead of sending someone an email telling them that sales are
down 12% this quarter, you show everyone a graph with a thick red line sloping
down and to the right.

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TrevorJ
That isn't a graph, it is a graphic.

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sp332
Or a "chartoon", as Tufte calls them.
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YslQ2625TR4>

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tel
These suggestions aren't very good suggestions for making charts in general.
Instead they seem to be biased for an audience which doesn't want to parse and
understand your data but simply be wowed by hand-waving and feel quantitative
reassurance in that belief.

John Tukey (I believe) suggested that there were two broad classes of charts:
exploratory and descriptive. Exploratory (Tufte style) seek to visually
describe as many variances in your data and their relations both to one
another and the marginal totals. With all this at hand, a careful analysis may
reveal patterns and idiosyncrasies in your data. Descriptive comes later, once
you know what you want to present, and seeks to maximize the visibility of
whatever detail you're highlighting while providing appropriate context. It's
the kind of statistic that "lies" via omission (or, rather, selective
attention) but it also leaves the hints that let a careful reader suspect a
larger picture.

Godin's suggestions don't really produce either of these though. Without
contextualization his graphs are simply ethos arguments wrapped up in a white
lab coat.

Not to rag on him: I'm sure he knows this, too. These aren't really
suggestions for good graphs but instead for good presentation of technical
matters to non-technical audiences: an endeavor which is probably doomed to
live as a half-lie.

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steveeq1
He neglected to say what program to use to make the graphs. Any suggestions?

~~~
snprbob86
You can use all the traditional tools. Just take the time to tweak the
settings to achieve something that is both unique and effective. Office 2007
has much better defaults and you can accomplish a more original look with only
a few clicks, so at least do that. But if you want a graph that really rocks,
you need to really tweak it.

