Jorge Camoes’ Charts

How do you sell your outrageously expensive consulting services? Simple, just add a chart…
Not every chart will do, of course. Let me outline some basic design rules of what I call a “consulting chart”:

It shouldn’t be recognizable as a standard chart that you could create in Excel;
It shouldn’t use popular eye-catching design elements, like 3D […]

Always ask yourself: “what can I remove from this chart”? Remove Excel defaults, remove grid lines, make the chart smaller, use soft colors, remove irrelevant labels, remove the legend (by directly labeling series), remove series that you don’t really need, remove frames, remove decimal places, remove visual fluff.
Then ask yourself: “what can I add to […]

More data = better decisions, right? Not always. When you are getting more information than you can process within a specific time period information overload starts creeping. Confusion, stress, anxiety and low motivation usually follow. Can we prevent that?
In general, the more information you have, the more accurate your decisions will be. But at some […]

Do you prefer the full report:

Or the executive summary?

For Tufte’s fans, Minard’s map plays a central role in Tufte’s iconography, and the way he praises it (”best statistical graphic ever”) is quoted endlessly (974 results in Google as of today, to be precise). Tufte discussed The Map in his first book (The Visual Display of […]

Dear Mr. Hervé Carré
I’ve been browsing through some of the Eurostat publications and I thought you would appreciate some constructive feedback, since it is your job to ensure that governments, businesses, media and the general public do have access in a timely manner to reliable and objective data. I’m starting with some general findings, then […]

For many of us this is a provocative question. Haven’t Tufte, Few, Cleveland and many others proved that, beyond reasonable doubt? Isn’t there a prosperous industry based on the obvious usefulness of charts and information visualization? Is everyone wrong?
Let me play devil’s advocate here. A large majority of charts you’ll find in the corporate sector […]

The relevance principle means that every variation should carry a meaning, derived from data variation, not from design variation. If it doesn’t, it can be confusing or misleading.
Suppose chart A displays population density by country. “Vary colors by point” is an option in Excel, but why should you use it? This is a design variation […]

How to create better charts? Search the web and you’ll find many specific advices, not always backed up by scientific evidence (can there be any?). Tufte’s advices are great for us, rational, positivist members of the human race, but what about those emotional poor fellows for whom a minimalistic chart is just a boring chart?
Can […]

We all know how found of pie charts Tufte is:
A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them, for then the viewer is asked to compare quantities located in spatial disarray both within and between charts (…). Given their low […]

This chart [via Junk Charts] in the New York Times uses a “tornado” chart (a population pyramid-like chart) to display two series, advertising spending in measured (traditional media) and unmeasured (Internet…) channels.
When discussing how to create population pyramids, I wrote that I don’t really like tornado charts, specially if you only have two series, […]