For many people the first word that comes to mind when they think about statistical charts is ālie.ā
ā Edward R. Tufte
![William Playfair, 1801, Statistical map showing the extent, population and income of the principal nations of Europe The birth of the pie chart. Playfairās attempt to show the size of European countries by relating them to planets, saying: āwe have a more accurate idea of the sizes of the planets, which are spheres, than of the nations of Europe [ā¦] all of which are irregular formsā](https://photos.tylercipriani.com/thumbs/4d/7b7093596f72b025439eda463f52ca/large.jpg)
When I moved from engineering to management, people expected me to make charts.
After spending some time learning about data visualization, Iāve come to two important conclusions:
- Good data visualization is powerful
- Powerful data visualization is rare
But creating a compelling chart is an underrated superpower for engineers. Here are some ideas that helped me learn how to do that.
Learning from experts
The best books Iāve read on data visualization are:
- āThe Visual Display of Quantitative Informationā by Tufte, and
- āStorytelling with Dataā by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic
Between those two books, you get a balance: the ideal (from Tufte) and the PowerPoint world (from Knaflic).
Tufte
Edward R. Tufte is professor emeritus of statistics, political science, and computer science at Yale.
And heās a man upset by pie charts.
the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them.
ā Edward R. Tufte
Tufteās rules:
- š¦Maximize the data-ink ratio ā Most of your chart should be data. Erase the parts that convey nothing.
- š«Avoid chart junk ā Avoid needless colors, shading, tickmarks, and gridlines: remove distractions from data.
Knaflic
Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic was the former manager of Googleās People Analytics team. She knows her way around a PowerPoint1.
Knaflicās rules:
- šChoose an appropriate visual display ā Know your context, then pick your chart
- š°Tell a story ā Charts ought to communicate something; you should know what that something is.
Tufteās principles: a case study
Take a look at this chart from the Wikimedia Foundationās 2023ā2024 budget projections:

This is a default Google Sheets chart for this data.
What Iām able to glean from this chart:
- āBuilding analytics & ML Servicesā: the biggest, > 25%
- āFeatures and functionalityā and āSupporting volunteersā: smaller, ~20% each
- āFundraising,ā āProtecting access,ā and āGeneral & Adminā: smaller still, ~10% each
- The colors seem meaningless
Now consider what we glean from the table used to generate it:
Program | Budget (millions) | Percent |
---|---|---|
Building analytics & ML services | $46.4 | 26.2% |
Features and functionality | $39.7 | 22.4% |
Supporting volunteers | $35.1 | 19.8% |
General & Admin | $21.3 | 12.0% |
Fundraising | $17.9 | 10.1% |
Protecting access | $16.6 | 9.4% |
Total | $177.0 | 100.0% |
This table gives us more information than the chart in a similar amount of space.
From the table, we learn:
- Exact percentagesāno need to guess
- Exact dollar amounts
- The total budget as a dollar figure
And we get rid of the meaningless colors.
OKāconfession time: there were percentages on the original pie chart. I edited them out.
But I did that to prove a point. The pie chart is doing less work than the numbers. The slices of the pie add almost nothing to the numbers.
Tufte would prefer the table above to the pie chart above because the table:
- Shows the data
- Maximizes the data-ink ratio
- Avoids chartjunk (like the meaningless colors)
And in this case, I agree: I like the table.
But choosing data visualizations is difficult.
How to choose a chart: visual perception accuracy ranked
If you intend to communicate, then people must be able to read your chart.
In 1985, Cleveland & McGill conducted what is still the most cited experiment on what charts are easiest to read. Their purpose was simple: rank standard charts by the number of errors people make while reading them.
Hereās their ranking of chartsāfrom easiest to hardest to read:
Icon | Name | Example |
---|---|---|
![]() |
Position along a common scale | scatterplots, bar charts, sparklines |
![]() |
Positions along nonaligned scales | stacked bar charts |
![]() |
Length, direction, angle | pie charts, donut charts |
![]() |
Area | bubble charts, treemaps |
![]() |
Volume, curvature | 3d charts |
![]() |
Shading, color saturation | Heatmaps |
But I love heatmaps! You can use heatmaps. Just understand that only a sophisticated audience can interpret heatmaps correctly.
Know your audience, then use something like the data viz catalog to choose your chart.
Tell a story
Charts are communication.
At their worst, as Tufte said, theyāre little more than ādevices for showing the obvious to the ignorant.ā
But at their best, theyāre a powerful way to intuitively communicate a lot of data in a small space.
Tufte will not help you with PowerPoint. In his essay, āThe Cognitive Style of PowerPointā (which is included in the book āBeautiful Evidenceā), he says: ābulleted outlines make us stupidā before going on to blame PowerPoint for the space shuttle Columbia disaster.ā©ļø
To see posts by date, check out the archives
To see posts by date, check out the archives

If thereās one thing that feels like itās gotten worse in my lifetime, itās air quality.
Coloradoās air quality last week was dismal, filled with smoke from Canadian wildfires, making Denverās air quality among the worst of any major city.
This is what happened to air quality four miles from my house:

And hereās the air quality index (AQI) in my bedroom:

You can see spikes from cooking. And you can see the moment (2023-05-19T22:25 MDT) I swapped out the aging filter on my little LEVOIT air purifier, holding particulate in check, returning indoor air quality to baseline.
Why care about air quality?
Acute exposure to air pollution makes you acutely dumber.
This was the conclusion of MIT researchers back in 2022 when they looked at the effect of air quality on chess.
They combed through 30,000 chess moves, evaluating them with the Stockfish chess engine, comparing 121 players against themselves under different air quality conditions (which they monitored with foobot sensors).
The researchers concluded that an increase as small as 10 µg/m³ PM2.5 causes a 2.1% increased likelihood of player error.
Measuring air quality

Reference particle mass counters cost thousands of dollars. And even so-called low-cost air sensors like the ubiquitous PurpleAir will set you back $200.
But the same sensors used inside the PurpleAir, the PlanTower PMS5003, can be found for as little as $15 on AliExpress.
The Plantower sensor, however, is far from a reference device. But studies suggest itās directionally correct. And, with after-the-factory calibration, it can match readings from more expensive reference meters1.
The Plantower PMS5003 features in AirGradientās DIY printed circuit board (PCB), which combines air quality, temperature, and CO2 sensors with a cheap ESP8266 for internet. I ordered ten of these PCBs from PCBWay back in 2021 for about $30.
Iāve since modified AirGradientās example code to support pushing data to Home Assistant via MQTT. From there, sensor data gets sucked up by Prometheus, so I can monitor it via Grafana.

This system gives me a full view of my indoor air quality. And itās a needlessly complicated way of reminding me to change out my air filter š¬.
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