It is pretty! But is it required?

My this week blog is about how “visual noise” deviates the user from interesting data. Even a credential source like The Economist Magazine falls into trap of beautifying their charts to a level that they lose their purpose.

In their edition “The world in 2012” they published the following chart
The above chart basically matches price of gold to yield of bonds. To somebody who reads The Economist, the above correlation holds substantial value but the visual noise created by distracting image (coin), extremely enlarged chart and microscopic font deviates the attention of the reader.

Following is another such example:
In this chart too, it is difficult to concentrate on the plotted columns while ignoring the cranes and workers that litter the chart. These irrelevant decorations just compel the reader to work harder than they otherwise should to discover the meaning hidden in the data.

A designer should understand that making a chart beautiful to the level that the data looses its integrity actually works against the designer. It makes the chart non effective and fail to provide give quick insights that aid decision making.

The most common chart junk items include:
1. Cartoons or irrelevant decorations: These meaningless decoration do not excite reader about the data rather just add work on user’s side.
2. Dark grid-lines: They often tend to deviate user’s attention. The best practice is to use soft grey grid-lines or eliminate whenever possible.
3. Bright and bold colors: Bright colors are too tiring to look at and also one should be careful about color blind audience.
4. Uppercase: Uppercase should be used only when an element requires special attention.
5. 3-D effects: Three dimensional effect just adds to confusion in readers mind than adding relevant context.

In conclusion, I would state that a good practice after creating a chart is to step back, identify unnecessary items and remove them. Also, one should repeat this process until nothing else can be removed and the visualization has a purpose and supports the objective.

Reference:
http://www.exceluser.com/blog/1133/good-examples-of-bad-charts-chart-junk-from-a-surprising-source.html
https://www.blue-granite.com/blog/data-visualization-remove-chart-clutter-and-focus-on-the-insights