Data Storytelling 8: Step by step guide to fixing your graphs

Whole post is actionable advice you should use.

Alright, so, here’s a graph that people use all the time. Let’s go fix it.

1 - Yeet the border

Recall from the gestalt principles of closure that setting up borders, although makes the graph look pretty, does indeed require the audience to spend a bit of brain power. Ideally, you want to use the whitespace itself as a seperator, not the border here. So, go ahead and kick out the border.

2 - Yeet the gridlines

Ideally in a line graph, the goal is for the audience is to visually see the up, and down trends, and they generally don’t know to know the exact precise values. So, kicking out the horizontal gridline is a great thing. However, every now and then, there are circumstances where your audience does want to know the precise values. In those cases, you can make the gridline extremely thing, and grey colored.

3 - Remove the data markers

See those dots on each of those lines? Those are