Until a few years ago, I thought data visualization wasn’t very interesting. At best, it was a nice bonus in my work. I preferred writing because I found it gave me the space to get across the details and clarifications that people would often miss on a flashy chart.
Anyway, most data visualizations I had come across were not very good. A lot of graphs were (and still are) confusing, misleading, or overly simplistic. I’ve seen quite a lot – three dimensional bar charts, double-axis charts with completely different scales for the same metric, unitless charts, pizza slice charts with sizes that corresponded to nothing in the data. Even now I come across charts that are ugly in such novel ways that I wonder how much imagination it must have taken to create them.