Junk Charts talk
May 03, 2010
The NYU talk was quite successful, and it was great to meet some of our readers in person. The slides can be downloaded from here (800 KB pdf). There were many thoughtful questions from the audience.
The talk was called "Five Years of Chart Reading". Probably should have subtitled it, "condensed to 20 minutes". While preparing the talk, I realized that I have written over 500 posts since the blog came into being. I know, that works out to be only once every 3 or 4 days, what a lazy bum. But since most of my posts are substantive, the collection really did cover a lot of ground.
For many readers, especially those who have followed the blog from its early days, the contents of the talk should be familiar. I had time to develop only one general theme--not surprisingly, I picked "self-sufficiency".
I did introduce one new idea: the "Trifecta Checkup" framework for chart critique. I believe this is the constant behind pretty much all the posts on Junk Charts. All outstanding charts have all three elements in harmony. Typically, a problematic chart gets only two of the three pieces right. I will be elaborating on this framework in subsequent posts.
In the first half of the talk, Dona Wong gave examples of her work at the Wall Street Journal, and Siegel+Gale, which is a brand consulting company that designed the 1040EZ form. Like myself, she believes the key to good graphics lies with the upfront "data strategy", and not tools or software. I particularly liked her examples of portraying relative energy consumption of various household appliances, displaying daily spending patterns in a way that answers the question directly, and revamping the weather section to be more "business-friendly".
Check out Wong's new book on graphics here.