I'd like to point out that there has also been some research done in order to see how to exploit these sorts of "sketchy" visualizations for information visuali

I'd like to point out that there has also been some research done in order to see how to exploit these sorts of "sketchy" visualizations for information visualization. This paper by Wood et al. contains some very nice examples, as well as small user study: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1274/ http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/1274/ They show that users can judge the degree of "sketchiness" on an ordinal scale but that the judgement varies extremely between individuals.