Designing Effective Figures and Charts
Purpose
This exercise will give you practice using Edward Tufte’s principles to (1) identify poor design choices in graphs or charts, and (2) recommend design improvements.
Understanding Tufte’s principles and how to apply them will help you to design figures and tables for your own work that communicate clearly.
What to do
Step 1: Reading
Read Chapters 2 and 4
from Edward Tufte’s book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information.
Step 2: Critique
Find two graphs or charts in documents you use at work or in professionally-published periodicals like a newspaper, magazine, or journal.
For each graph, describe how it could be redesigned to communicate the key message more effectively. As you write your explanation, explain which of Tufte’s principles of graphical integrity (page 77) or principles of data graphics (page 105) justify your analysis.
