What is your ink to data ratio?

Before you prepare your slides for your next trial, or slap together another PowerPoint for a client meeting or presentation, read this article setting out some basic principles of information design from Luigi Canali De Rossi.  In it, the author gives some suggestions on ways to better present data (charts, graphs, etc.) in presentations.  Here are a few:

• Drop unplanned and unfunctional 3D effects from your information graphic. Unless you are a trained designer drop 3D graphs in favor of the apparently simpler and less fancy traditional 2D graphs.
• Eliminate all frames and borders. They are not needed. Your data will not escape the newly found free space around it, but it will "breathe" and will provide with a more relaxing and legible visual space.
• Drop also all unneeded borders of colors, bars, slices. Your eye can tell a column from an empty space without the addition of black ink around every object created by computer software.
• Cut the prison bars. The horizontal and vertical "gridlines" that many graph tools utilize is nothing short of a visual prison, sold to us with the excuse of helping our eyes better find the value reflected by each bar.
• Do not utilize bitmap, hatches, patterns to differentiate different bars, columns or slices. These effects are the heritage of the old times when there was no color available to differentiate different graph elements. These solutions are highly disturbing to the eye, they "vibrate" and create so called moiré effects. More than anything they look ugly and old-fashioned.
• Drop, eliminate, mute or simplify all remaining visual components which serve only decorative or unnecessary graphic-enhancing purposes. Reiterate and improve, until you can actually see that the quantity of ink you are using is truly serving the very purpose of communicating real data.

I know I’ve violated at least four of these rules in presentations over the last few years.  How about you?

Update:  If you want to learn more about presenting data, check out this article about Constructing Bad Charts and Graphs.