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The majority of plots are strictly black and white, and I'm interested in how legible they are even when they're showing lots of data. I feel like there are so
by heisenzombie 5y ago
The majority of plots are strictly black and white, and I'm interested in how legible they are even when they're showing lots of data.
I feel like there are some techniques that are lost when color is so easy to use.
Also there are some simple touches -- like gridlines that only go as far as they need to (e.g. page 23) -- that would be trivial for a hand-drawn plot but quite difficult in "modern" tooling.
- ggm 5y agoColour is easy if you have a colour printer. in 1914, b&w printing was significantly more common than colour for book production. The reason most old books have a "plates" section is that colour printing required higher quality paper and more expensive printing techniques. You can roneostat b&w and you can hand-cut graphics onto a roneostat sheet. If you've never worked with carbon paper, it was a messy business.
- heisenzombie 5y agoHm, perhaps worded wrongly but I agree. I'm saying that the plots in this book were working under limitations (like black and white) and yet produced excellent results through good design and techniques that are less-used nowadays.
- dtagames 5y agoThe author makes many mentions of color in the original charts he cites and how it was used to improve the designs which already work well in B&W.
- rjtavares 5y agoLots of professionals (e.g. Data Journalists) still do those finishing touches in tools like Adobe Illustrator. Here's a NYT tool to convert d3.js graphics to SVG to allow manual editing: https://github.com/NYTimes/svg-crowbar https://github.com/NYTimes/svg-crowbar
- dtagames 5y agoThere's an old rule in graphic design that "it has to work in B&W first."