What surprises me with visualisation is that you soon find yourself on your own when it comes to making a 'simple' graph. This takes you out in to a whole world of coding that nobody else will ever re-use.
The examples out there will not do for your data and even if you wonder 'am I using the wrong chart for this?' you can find that you are not.
Recently I needed to do a stacked bar chart with different things in each stack. Imagine column 1 - fruit - with that broken down by apples/bananas/oranges and column 2 - vegetables - with that broken down by tomatoes/potatoes/carrots.
The other problem area was colouring the chart. I generated colours in the hsl colour space so that where something was on the chart determined colour and how much of it there was determined saturation/lightness. Some people get offended by eXcel style hard colours so I could not just use random clashing colours and call it a day.
Beautiful visualisations are hard, even with the best graph tools out there I expect some inevitable situation of being an edge case and having to find solutions the hard way. The goal being so that nobody even notices the hard work put in. Only if the graph is ultra intuitive and simple is it going to work with some audiences. Simplicity is hard.
The examples out there will not do for your data and even if you wonder 'am I using the wrong chart for this?' you can find that you are not.
Recently I needed to do a stacked bar chart with different things in each stack. Imagine column 1 - fruit - with that broken down by apples/bananas/oranges and column 2 - vegetables - with that broken down by tomatoes/potatoes/carrots.
The other problem area was colouring the chart. I generated colours in the hsl colour space so that where something was on the chart determined colour and how much of it there was determined saturation/lightness. Some people get offended by eXcel style hard colours so I could not just use random clashing colours and call it a day.
Beautiful visualisations are hard, even with the best graph tools out there I expect some inevitable situation of being an edge case and having to find solutions the hard way. The goal being so that nobody even notices the hard work put in. Only if the graph is ultra intuitive and simple is it going to work with some audiences. Simplicity is hard.