I spent 50 hours drawing a line graph

I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand.

One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.

I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.

A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.

I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.

Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.

Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.

This should be a competitive sport, like gymnastics. He's attempting the bevel! With extra-wide lines! Very ambitious, but unfortunately he often fails to stick the corner alignments, the bevel distances are poorly controlled, and the data is unsuitably spiky for that choice of line joint. 7/10.

Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship.

Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kiss https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...

(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)

> A professional draftsman of the 1920's may cringe at the imperfections in my line graph above. They can suck it.

I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)

Fantastic read!

In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.

What a astonishing and intrsting journey! Nowadays with AI with software everyone is rushing in everywhere everydays. Especially the AI come out. Sometimes in this life. We forgot how we feel this world and hot to do something in one heart. Your story tell me that. Why the world need so fast? Why we can't just enjoy the process of doing things, rather than just focusing on the result.

This may me wonder that. Why people like things to be done so quick? Because life is short. You can do limit of things in your life. So just do as many as possible.

Why? Why we can't just slow it down. Why we just enjoy the life. Is that we slow down we can't survive? Is we slow down that we will left behind? So be it! Just change a life, maybe is difficault, maybe is hard. But you slow down. you can concentrate to do one thing. You can enjoy the prccess. May be meet some beautiful thing.

I envy you can focus on one thing for 50 hours straight. This is what we can't do in this noisy, rush, busy plase in this very downtown.

A comment from who live in a city and cage here can't getaway.

This the most hackernews post I've ever seen. Doing something in 50 hours that could have taken 20 minutes because vibe.

I love it.

The peak irony is that most of us work in a field that exists so that people don't need to do that stuff for 50 hours.

Thanks, the article puts into perspective the Bret Victor's point about William Playfair, who invented many of the data diagrams we use today, including the line graph. It was strange to see something as basic to how we think about data was invented only in late 18th century. But seeing the amount of work you put to design them properly clarifies the amount of creative thinking that was required to get something like this going on.

I'd also wish more graphs would come with this level of detail as this image from the article [0]. It would be so useful to see precisely where the data points are and how the line and interpolation are constructed.

[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/images/hand-drawn-data-outline...

You should add in Calvin Schmid's Handbook of Graphic Presentation into your list Doug -- https://archive.org/details/HandbookOfGraphicPresentation/pa...

Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.

They look really good. I really enjoy looking at midcentury engineering charts/diagrams and stuff like jeppesen charts. NASA has a lot of good ones. The way the text looks, the line economy, the general aesthetic. Well worth the effort imo!

And here I thought drawing graphs in TikZ was doing it manually.

Love the article, this is why I browse HN.

And remember that perfection is the enemy of the good. I needed a little bit of drafting to design a sun room and started looking at software options. I didn't immediately like anything so I grabbed a ruler and a piece of paper and drew what I wanted pretty quickly using the standard 1/4"=1' scale. Precision is actually unimportant, everything will need to be fitted by the builder in the end, even if an architect measured and drew everything in AutoCAD/Revit. But very quickly you can get good results without even a drafting table and T-square. I have the T-square and triangles, but didn't have the space to work with them, and I'm happy enough with the result.

I did technical drawing at school (pre computers... pencil, paper, t-square, compass, etc). It really was quite fun constructing things with pencil and paper. I think one good thing about it is you'd end up with a very intimate understanding of the thing you are designing because every tiny aspect took you mental effort to construct. I also think it really helped me understand projecting 3d into 2d, though on my old Atari 800XL, that was tricky and I dreamed of the day of high resolution screens...like 800x600 and 256 colors :)

The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion.

My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches.

I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.

As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.

https://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/example/

Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.

It’s nice to see something on HN that isn’t about writing a prompt so that you can pretend to work.

I absolutely love the graphs that were used in old medical physiology papers. Something about the hand-drawn nature makes you appreciate both the underlying concept the graph is trying to convey as well as the work that went into it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge techie. I love computers and computer graphics, but sometimes a hand-drawn graph just takes the cake.

I (perhaps mistakenly) saw the article as metaphor.

50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.

Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!

(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)

Seeing the artistry involved in old "paperwork" also helps drive home how years of computing (and printing) technology has dramatically reduced the "price per diagram."

Even if they aren't always as nice, a kid can have graphs for weekly homework that would have been hours of work by a professional back then.

What's been more interesting to me lately than using software to design data visualizations is learning to draw data by hand. It's a time consuming process but incredibly rewarding. The feeling of erasing graphite to reveal clean, crisp lines is something that software cannot recreate.

This is my favourite kind of post here

Never, ever ask for forgiveness for, purely for the love of it, learning skills and creating by hand anything that can be mass-produced. Learning and craftsmanship are their own rewards.

And your coffee-maker apparently still had all its coffee when it finally got back from from Russia!

(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)

Reminds me of process I went through to create the charts for my humble grad thesis (1990-ish), by hand, with letter templates and one very expensive rotring pen. Then would transfer the figures to transparencies as backup for my defense. The real presentation was done using a slide projector (this was cutting edge back then, like over-the-top). Yes, took actual photos of my charts..

With the advent of AI, I’d expect these resources to become a goldmine within about 20 years. Libraries will become hives of activity as dens of nostalgia.

Very nice and a beautiful result.

Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.

What do you use?

This is a lovely toy project. But please do not do this for real; imperfections - even minute imperfections - in data visualisations have consequences. 'Non-techy' people take for granted shapes and lines over numbers and sequences simply because computers are accurate. Correctness of data is a separate matter of course

What I'm curious now is how one could use software (even PowerPoint) to make graphs that replicate that handmade aesthetic.

I held the role of (land) surveying draftsman, during the early 2000s years when the surveying profession was partway through the transition between manual drawings and digital processes.

Being a young man then, I was our offices champion of new technology, but years of legacy projects still being tied off meant I had no choice but to learn and practice many of the manual skills.

So my job was a weird mix of pushing everybody into the cutting edge of tech, then having to go and do some 50-100+ year old processes using special pens and papers and even chemicals.

For example, the look up the 'diazo machine' -style of copier. Then imagine going into a small room with an armful of 30 x A1-sized engineering plans, and standing next to this machine for 2 hours slowly feeding in each page while surrounded by ammonia fumes. These days, the Wikipedia page says : "When making multiple copies of an original no more than four or five copies can typically be made at a time, due to the build-up of ammonia fumes, even with ventilation fans in the duplication room", but back then the working reality was more like "Junior staff member! I need four copies of these! <hands over armful of A1>".

Much cooler was the Houston Instruments pen plotter. A machine whose vacuum bed (think of air hockey) held the paper down while rollers ratcheted it back and forth at high speed, and a robotic pen arm 'printed' out a plan by physically drawing it with pens. It automatically changes to different pens when it needs different line thicknesses (or even colours). All done at such a whirlwind of organised precision, it was a joy to watch.

Another aspect of the manual age was the notion of Originals, or Master Copies. That is, for important documents, there'd be a master copy printed out on high grade stock - often archival grade, multi-layered Mylar or similar, for stability and durability. It could be hard work when a project made a late change, because at worst you might find yourself having to (e.g.) manually remove and extremely-carefully redraw an entire table of figures on a master plan. Sometimes just because row 1 of that table had changed such that the rest had to be moved down. The removal involved caaarrrefully buffing the ink off the page using a rotating electric eraser. If you put a hole in the plan by rubbing too hard on one spot, god help you. Doing that, then having to get 5 different signatures from high people in various offices redone on a new master copy, while a large project could be held up for weeks while delays and interest and costs accrue, would be considered a fairly notable faux pas.

My dad had that lettering kit! Even look like exactly that model and typography.

Short and simple: slow work teaches you things automation hides.

Hi, the irony of spending 50 hours on something specifically designed to communicate quickly is not lost on me. Would love to see a time-lapse.

I like the article (lost art, indeed!) --- please consider using a proportional font, however... fixed-width fonts have lower readability.

I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.

One day I wish to be in a stable enough place that it's possible for me to pursue activities like these. It's a true privilege

Nicely written and I thought D3.js was very verbose and time consuming. Makes me appreciate all the computational tooling we have today.

I don't like how the clickable area for images extends to the full width of the page even though the image itself does not.

Reminds me of the movie the great arch where the main lead who was an architect refused to use computer simulations.

Does he explain what the red dots in the titles of his work are meant to be? Possibly I didn’t read carefully enough

Delightful!

While not as authentic as a hand-drawn chart, I find Decker can produce HyperCard-like graphs nicely.

Fantastic article! Reminded me of my favorite engineering drawing class from the undergrad days.

This reminds me of the great pleasure I got from technical drawing at school.

Reminds me of https://www.dear-data.com/theproject

Love it. Are any of your viz up for sale?

Heh. Which if y'all borrowed the Tufte book?

It's ok, I can wait...

Great article, enjoyed reading it.

Graph paper FWT :)