14 Comments

Long post but really good one.

It’s probably one of the few that I have seen on DATA storytelling.

Your plots resonate so much with what I tell my team. And they align a lot with my favourite book (Cole Nussbaumer).

If you are curious about edge cases you might encounter and how to best plot them, I have a running series on data viz (currently 9 posts, probably I will get to 20) 😉

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Thank you! Agree it’s long, but hopefully value-dense.

Looking forward to checking out your data viz series!

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Amazing post, Tessa and Torsten! Thanks as well for the mention. Great callout on showing clear deltas 😎

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Thanks Jordan!

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This covers almost all the scenarios and how to handle them exactly what I was looking for .It is really helpful for anyone trying to excel or start learning about the art of storytelling …thank you!

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Glad to hear the post was helpful!

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I enjoyed reading this long form, and I particularly enjoyed the graphics - they send a clear message!

Can you please clarify what you mean by "having a single axis" (best practice #5)? When we represent a 2D viz, we represent y = f(x). Literally, one axis means 1D, but I don't think that's the intended meaning. I feel like I'm missing something. Thank you!

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Hey; thanks for flagging. What’s meant is “a single Y axis”; many charts have two Y axes, making them unnecessarily complicated.

I’ll edit the text to reflect this.

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I really need to see a chart with more than one Y axis - my brain refuses to visualize it :) Is it a 3D one? Please point me to an example - I enjoy learning "don't"s and finding ways to transform them into "do"s. Taking something complex and distill it into simple things is an art form IMO.

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Here’s a random example with a secondary Y axis. Very hard to read it quickly.

Sometimes, the secondary axis makes sense, but in most cases, you’re better off doing a separate chart, bubbles below the chart etc instead. At least that’s my experience.

https://inforiver.com/wp-content/uploads/customize-data-labels-scaled.webp

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Thanks, Torsten - very illuminating.

Here's my silly comment: "Oops, it seems like my toddler scribbled on top of my beautiful viz - sorry."

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I’ve bookmarked this for future use

I’ve been using grok, Claude and perplexity for data gathering often outside of the organization

I’m going to feed this article to them as context to make my generated charts better

Truly great article, I read carefully every sentence. Unheard of for Substack and me, I’m usually a skimmer!

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Wow, thanks so much for the kind words.

Feeding it into an AI tool is a great idea; I did that with other guides like sanity checking before, and it worked quite well. Curious to hear about the results!

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Working on a post this month that’s graph heavy I’ll message you with it, and share some of the before and after info get a second

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