There is a very good series of posts by Andrew Gelman (a statistician at Columbia) on the tension between statistical graphics (eminently clear at the risk of b

There is a very good series of posts by Andrew Gelman (a statistician at Columbia) on the tension between statistical graphics (eminently clear at the risk of being boring) and information visualizations (captivating, colorful, and novel, but obscuring the data): http://andrewgelman.com/2011/08/infovis-and-statgraphics-update-update/ http://andrewgelman.com/2011/08/infovis-and-statgraphics-upd... Professionally I do projects on the former side of the spectrum, but as with any design you just need to know the audience and how you want them to use the graphic---to grab their attention and interest, or to catalyze insight about a data set.