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Comment by oulipo | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, if someone wanted to present that exact dataset efficiently, they would have probably proposed something much different, like an horizontal chart with thin lines, eg

North [------------] 7

South [--------] 5

East [--------] 5

West [-----] 3

or something, which would have saved a lot of data/ink ratio

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You could just remove the bars and present the numbers in a table. In this case I think that would be a considerable improvement (unless the chart is one of several similar charts that one might want to compare, in which case being able to compare their shapes at a glance would have value).

That's Tufte's first guideline, anyway. Present data in a table unless it's better visualized as a graph.

For sure! It is all about context of use and the audience. I think the pie chart also serves its purpose in the right context and in front of the right audience. I would probably write a much longer article using different charts to illustrate all the various contexts but I don't want to be writing a textbook in the era of short attention spans. In this case, picking a bar chart to illustrate some principles clearly isn't going to satisfy everyone :p

But I will perhaps add a couple more examples based on all the comments and feedback so far. If nothing else I certainly enjoyed getting more people thinking and talking about how we can improve data visualization design!

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