If you follow many blogs of people in the data visualization community, you'll see right away how often they talk about an iterative process in drawing out a st

If you follow many blogs of people in the data visualization community, you'll see right away how often they talk about an iterative process in drawing out a story. There's a big exploratory component, where they investigate possible approaches and try and find something interesting they can show. On the one hand, you want some significant features and relationships that exist in the data to be apparent to any intelligent reader who spends a little time studying your visualization. On the other hand, you don't want to distort the data, or impose an interpretation on it that isn't warranted. For a well-done visualization, there is definitely a lot more work going into the final product than simply plotting some dimensions against some other dimensions. As an example, the New York Times pours a lot of money (and therefore talent and person-hours) into their visualization work. Some of the behind-the-scenes of that operation is blogged about here: http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/ http://chartsnthings.tumblr.com/