Chart Rules, As Simple as Possible, But Not Any Simpler!

In chart design it’s good to make things simple, but you certainly should avoid oversimplification. As Einstein said:

"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler"

Seth Godin presented in his blog The three laws of great graphs:

1. One Story
2. No Bar Charts
3. Motion

Effective chart design rules are simple, but reducing it to this set of 3 rules certainly is an over-oversimplification.

Particularly rule 2 is flawed. Seth details rule 2:

"NO BAR CHARTS
Bar charts are dramatically overrated, primarily because they’re the first choice in many graphing programs.

The problem with bar charts is that they should either be line/area charts (when graphing a change over time, like unemployment rates) or they should be a simple pie chart (when comparing two or three items at the same scale).

Jorge, Kaiser and Jon already wrote some critical posts about this rule, where Jon suggested to replace rule 2 with

Choose Chart Types Intelligently

We are working tightly together with Stephen Few on a new product that helps business users creating effective charts with Excel and are therefore we are quite familiar with Stephen’s design principles.

Its an easy to learn set of rules

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