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Edward Tufte: Sparklines: theory and practice
- cma 16y agoDon't put them in a grid: http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0003Y1&topic_id=1 http://www.edwardtufte.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=0...
- teej 16y agoA major failing of sparklines in practice is the lack of a visual benchmark. When you don't have a fram of reference, it can be hard to tell what directions the lines are moving. You end up with an effect like this illusion: http://www.internetgamesfree.com/games/images/illusion_68.gif http://www.internetgamesfree.com/games/images/illusion_68.gi... where your perception of the line deviates from reality. The "normal range" line he shows does a great job to fix this.
- sahillavingia 16y agoI use them in one of my iPhone apps (Dayta) and it's an easy way to provide trends at a glance and make a simple design look much better in a few lines of code. Library used: http://key-solutions.ca/cksparkline.html http://key-solutions.ca/cksparkline.html
- yesbabyyes 16y agoI really like sparklines and I wish they were more common. I dream about Twitter adding support for them. ;) If you want to play with sparklines I can really recommend this library - it's very nice to work with and supports lots of different sparklines: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/ http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
- eitally 16y agoWe've started adding these selectively to internal tools to supplement more complex tools aimed at depicting progress or trend visualization. It's helped a ton, and goes a long way toward turning indecipherable IT goon geek speak into something normal users find helpful (along the same lines as somethings like Google's App Status Dashboard (http://www.google.com/appsstatus http://www.google.com/appsstatus), the Stashboard (http://www.stashboard.org/ http://www.stashboard.org/), or the Salesforce.com status board (http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/ http://trust.salesforce.com/trust/status/) do for red/yellow/green statuses at a glance.
- kevindway 16y agoI like sparklines in print, but not on the web. For me, it comes down to dpi. Until higher resolution displays are common, I'm likely to avoid.
- _delirium 16y agoI must admit I don't totally get what sparklines are and what they aren't. They seem quite recent, but the examples I see don't seem that unusual or new. Is it a new name for a concept, or is the concept itself new, or is it a particular take on or way of using that concept? For example, do gkrellm's "krells" count as an example of sparklines, or are they something else? --> http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm0.png http://members.dslextreme.com/users/billw/gkrellm/gkrellm0.p...
- michaels0620 16y agoOne of the main things that distinguishes sparklines from other small graphs is that they are "word sized" and can be integrated into a line of text. Because of this, the graphs tend to be wider than they are tall and also have a very clean appearance to them (not lot of background color or other "chart junk" as Tufte calls them). I would say what you linked to would not be considered sparklines from the above.
- ced 16y agoThese rules are useful heuristics, but a good graph has a purpose, and its parameters are chosen accordingly. So, while Tufte may favor a wide sunspot graph to emphasize the weak downward slope, my advisor (a solar scientist) would have slammed me for that. We already know that there's a weak downward slope. What we care about is the absolute magnitude of the peaks. Tufte's graph is useless here.
- beefman 16y agoTufte's had a lot of good ideas, but sparklines isn't one of them.
- Kliment 16y agoI'm impressed with the quality of the comments. They appear to be not only moderated, but also summarized in one line by Tufte, who then responds in a separate posting. Very pleasant and skimmable format.