Field note · September 14, 2024
Reader question — Choosing the form before the colours
Most bad charts are bad because someone picked a chart type from a toolbar. The type should be decided by what the data is being asked to do.
Reader question on Choosing the form before the colours, and the answer belongs somewhere more findable than an email.
Most bad charts are bad because someone picked a chart type from a toolbar. The type should be decided by what the data is being asked to do.
The question was, roughly, "when does this stop applying?" — which is the right question and the one lessons routinely fail to answer. Every technique has a range of validity, and stating it is what separates a lesson from a recipe.
It sits in the Showing the result module. The exercise is a thinking one rather than a query one — some of this material is about deciding what to compute, and that does not need a keyboard.
Ordering matters here more than in most courses. It follows When not to build a model and leads into Colour is an encoding, not decoration, and reading it out of sequence mostly works but costs you the setup.
Free means free, and it also means we can rewrite it whenever it is wrong. No edition, no errata PDF, nothing to repurchase. The whole course is 36 lessons and the fixes land the day we find them.