1.2 Graphics examples

It is easy to find examples of bad graphics. Some graphics texts and courses use bad graphics as examples to illustrate what you should not do—before explaining what you should do. This is not a common approach to teaching and will not be followed here. Musicians learn by listening to the best, artists learn by examining famous works, footballers study how well the game can be played, not how badly. Not everyone will think all the graphics in this book are good, but there are none that have been selected because they are especially bad.

The graphics are primarily intended for data exploration and have been drawn accordingly, somewhat better than default graphics and not as polished as presentation graphics. If they were designed for presentation, then fuller captions could be helpful, some labels could be made more user-friendly (although they all should be legible and understandable), and additional formatting could be improved, especially the colour choices. Some formatting details require much more effort than others, especially when smaller versions of originally larger graphics are used to refer to earlier examples, as in the second half of the book. Graphics in this book should not be judged individually in isolation but as part of a larger analysis. Accompanying text and associated graphics contribute to the overall picture. To study features in graphics it is useful not to be distracted by too much text and annotation. It can be like watching films with subtitles: so much effort may be directed to reading the subtitles that you do not see much of the film.