Junk Charts
Kaiser Fung
One of the longest-running chart critique blogs: published charts taken apart and, often, redrawn.
What you will find
- Critiques of charts from the news, business and advertising
- Redraws that show a better version of the same data
- The Trifecta Checkup: what is the question, what does the data say, what does the chart say
What we can learn from it
- 01Judge a chart on its question, its data and its visual together
- 02A redraw is the strongest argument in any critique
Chart types you will meet there
Pie chart
Divides a circle into slices proportional to each category’s share of the whole.
Bar chart
Horizontal bars compare a measure across categories, with room for long category names.
Slope chart
Connects each item’s value at two points in time, so direction and size of change read at a glance.
Similar sites
Storytelling with Data
A blog, podcast and books on communicating with data, known for before and after makeovers of business charts.
Nightingale
The journal of the Data Visualization Society, named after Florence Nightingale: essays, interviews and history from people who make charts.
FlowingData
Nathan Yau’s site on visualization and statistics: his own charts, a roundup of good work elsewhere, and tutorials on how to make them.