For the past few months I’ve been getting into Edward Tufte’s approach to visualizing data. Main points I’ve taken away thus far – minimize ink on the page; use formatting to guide the reader; use the right visualization for the data (if you have 10 data points, a graph is probably overkill). Turns out designing good data visualization is tough, so I’ve been practicing.
I made up a box and whisker style dynamic graph (since removed) of the water quality data available for the Watershed District I work for using D3.js. I’m pretty pleased with it; only downside is that it relies on SVG, which doesn’t work in Internet Explorer 7 and 8.