Legends are mostly unnecessary. Instead: get to the data. Look, that's what they've done here for the dollar and percentage signs. And for the scale info. Source: Wall Street Journal, 2006-11-21 [...]

On November 18th, msn news asked me: "How well do you score in the PISA test?" I click and answer questions on caries, evolution and the Earth's rotation. My brain hurts. Poor students. After wind [...]

Obama times: Yes we draw. Bars as long as they actually are. No problem at all in Obama country: The Wall Street Journal draws them over the whole page (click for full view). In the German newspaper [...]

Symbols are difficult. In most cases they don't work. Some of them have to be learnt. It takes longer than reading something you already know - e.g. a word. Awkward symbols make me sad. The arrow is [...]

Today I have to give advice to Barack. He'll be taking a dog to the White House. He doesn't know yet which. Best choice: a Labrador. Barney, the Terrier of George W., had his own website. The most intelligent [...]

The Wall Street Journal (2008-10-23) does it right. Nothing chopped off. The Royal Bank of Scotland in free fall. Nearly 14 %. You see it. The disaster as long as the column wide. In the German [...]

Intention of a data graph: review values. Register differences. Identify patterns. With this here only reviewing values is possible. You don't see differences. You don't see patterns. Source: Welt am [...]

We have got a sense for numbers. Naturally. Or acquired. Doesn't matter. Anyway: it brings space and numbers together. Linearly and proportionally. Intuitively. Automatically. Because of that my law of [...]

Right: All data within an eyespan. Wrong: Data as broad as an eyespan. As on the finance pages of the German newspaper Die ZEIT: Die ZEIT No. 25, 2008-06-12, p. 30. These few values would easily [...]

More than 70 percent of German citizens are satisfied with Angie. With Guido Westerwelle 39. With Oskar Lafontaine 19. Helmut of Focus magazine likes Angie. A lot. That’s why Focus calculates 71 divided [...]

Again. My law of proportion. The idea of a chart is: Display proportions between values with proportions of length. Proportional. Proportional. Proportional. You can ignore it. You can also lick out an [...]

Everyone starts into their vacation. We take a map with us. Maps show wherefrom, whereto, how long, how far, how mountainous, next to what, where can you swim, sleep, refuel. Where Lothar Mathäus is [...]

Graphics lie in many ways. Last week, German journal Wirtschaftswoche favored fudging with time scales. Three times in one issue alone. Indeed statistics are notoriously inaccurate. Often incomplete [...]

Another fashion among information designers: geo-graphs without geo-info. Since I am a European Union dog, I know where Great Britain and Spain are. I sniff around for geographical relationships. More [...]

Today the 24 hours of Le Mans end. Many cars raced around in circles for very long. Me too. With my eyes. In the journal Auto Motor Sport (issue 13, June 5th, 2008, inlay p. 6-19). Data for Audi on page [...]

From the chart I read that from 1999 till last year the number of passangers increased to  2.2 bn. During the same period there have been lately per 1 million flights  0.75 total write-offs for airplanes [...]

Many cut axes just because of Excel. And go to charting hell. Because when you cut you distort. And when you distort you lie. At least with your graph. The graphical change in your data is no longer proportional [...]

The day before yesterday Rolf and I raged again. We took apart annual reports of large corporate groups. We made fun of tachometers. We showed how charts lie. We established rules. We defined standards [...]

The eye cannot sort colors into a ranking. It only works with hues. That is why most colored graphs are hard to read. Hue needs a continuous measure (€, cm, km/h, etc.). Normally. An exception: in the [...]

Appetite always signals which piece of the pie is biggest. Always? Sort the pieces. How long did it take? Sort the bars. How long did it take? Values are the same in both cases. Eric has [...]

His day was ruined already. His beloved SportAuto newspaper had graphically demolished 500 yards of safety fence. I wanted to comfort him and skimmed through the paper. Issue seven 2006. Insiders know [...]

The German Newspaper "Die Süddeutsche" uses graphic tables in its online edition. They show positive and negative deviations. In the same direction. Here, they always quarrel about that. Pro: It’s [...]

In real life, the bad always win. That’s why we have the movies. In movies it’s the good who win. So in mine. The graceful heroine defeats the mean chart junkie. After severe struggle. Nerve-wracking [...]

Thanks Emil! Not too bad a graphic. Color is used as an attribute of the object in question. Better done than this one. Varnish reflects. Steel sheets are bended. Unnecessary. White for "overall" [...]

I have to curse the Financial Times once more. That is how you need to show stock quotes: Or is anyone interested in the "news" that the last day was up while twenty days before that where down? I [...]

Stock markets are so exciting for the Financial Times Deutschland. Either it's all bullish or altogether bearish. Every day anew. Nothing for investors with cardiac insufficiency who happen to have mislaid [...]

Business charts are losers. Its only good luck if they work at all. He has shown some basic problems of them. With mine here, you need more brains than luck to find the truth. Each series increases [...]