I’m very pleased to announce that I’ll be writing for Bonavista Systems‘ new company blog, More Information per Pixel.
As you may know, Bonavista is the maker of MicroCharts, the best implementation of Edward Tufte’s sparklines for Excel. Their parent company, XLCubed, offers analysis, reporting and dashboard solutions that extends the power of Excel much beyond its natural limits. I strongly believe in these technologies and share their underlying visualization principles, so it was disgustingly easy for Andreas to talk me into this. I’ll be writing twice a week.
Take a look at the blog now and find why resolution matters, why you should take the red pill and how a simple technique can improve your charts immediately. Andreas also wrote two posts about how perceptual laws can make your data tables look better and more useful.
There shouldn’t be much change around here. I’ll keep discussing general visualization principles, and publishing techniques you can use in a out-of-the-box Excel installation. I believe that good information visualization starts with Excel (or other similar spreadsheet), simply because that’s the tool people use and are comfortable with.
You don’t need SAS or Illustrator to make people aware that 3D pie charts are plain stupid. Once that moment comes, natural curiosity kicks in and people will find their way to products that can fill their needs. The new blog is the natural path users would follow, once they graduate from Charts…
I am sure the new blog will live up to its promise of More Information per Pixel. Please join us and subscribe it by email or RSS feed.
{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }
Nice. Are you transferring your efforts to the new blog, or merely contributing there when not writing here?
Jon: I really like the project and the tools, and they blend very well with what I write here. I’ll do my best to help the blog to succeed and become another great resource for best practices in information visualization, as we understand them.
This blog is my kindergarten. I have a small but growing readership (500 subscribers today! hurray!), people that trusted me and bought the Dashboard tutorial, people like you always willing to participate…
So, no, I have no reasons or plans, at this moment, to leave or transfer my efforts. There are so many things to do…
Congratulations. The product is great. I look forward to good things from your new blog.
that new blog looks very promising. I’m looking forward to read more of you!