Many of the charts that I see being passed around on social media because they’re confusing or misleading are also beautiful. They seem to have been created by people with great graphic design skills, but who’ve had little or no training in data visualization. Such designers may have been taught that "a visually engaging or aesthetically pleasing design is a good design" since that’s certainly true for most types of graphics, but they don’t seem to fully realize that charts are a special type of graphic with a slew of additional design considerations beyond just aesthetic appeal.
Charts aren’t like most other types of graphics because their primary purpose is to communicate information, not to be visually engaging or aesthetically appealing. That doesn’t mean that charts shouldn’t be beautiful, it just means that aesthetic appeal can never override clear communication when designing a chart. A beautiful chart that’s confusing or misleading is a bad chart, no matter how gorgeous or creative it is.
This is why making design decisions such as choosing a chart type or color palette based on what “looks good” is a great way to make a bad chart. Different chart types, color palettes, scales, etc. have different meanings and fundamentally alter how people perceive the underlying data. Choosing them based on aesthetic appeal instead of the meaning that they convey can easily yield a chart that goes viral for all the wrong reasons. It’s like choosing words for a sentence based on how nice they sound instead of what the words actually mean. You end up with beautiful-sounding gibberish.
Sometimes, though, I suspect that graphic designers who do have some knowledge of data visualization still deliberately create confusing or misleading charts because, well, they look more impressive. Perhaps they believe that if they create clear, simple-looking charts, no one will be impressed with their work. After all, anyone can create a simple line chart, right?
Well, I’d encourage those designers to consider the charts in world-class publications like The New York Times or The Economist. Most (though not all) of their charts are very simple-looking and stick to familiar chart types and techniques, but they’re actually quite impressive in that they communicate very clearly (and readers love them). And, perhaps surprisingly, they do require a great deal of skill to design. Like being able to produce clear, simple text that’s easy to read, it requires a considerable amount of training and background knowledge to produce charts that look simple and that don’t accidentally mislead (this blog post has a fuller description of what it takes to design good charts).
If graphic design training programs at least mentioned the fact that charts are a special type of graphic that require a substantial, additional set of specialized skills to design competently, I suspect that the incidence of beautiful, bad charts would be a lot lower. I’m not really plugged into the graphic design community, though, so if you happen to be and you think that this is important for them to hear, perhaps consider sharing this post within that community as a PSA.
By the way…
If you’re interested in attending my Practical Charts or Practical Dashboards course, here’s a list of my upcoming open-registration workshops.