Printable Exercise Sheets

Tufte taught me that excellence in data visualization is not about flashy graphics; it’s about intellectual honesty, clarity of thought, and a deep respect for both the data and the audience. I saw a carefully constructed system for creating clarity. We encounter it in the morning newspaper as a jagged line depicting the stock market's latest anxieties, on our fitness apps as a series of neat bars celebrating a week of activity, in a child's classroom as a colourful sticker chart tracking good behaviour, and in the background of a television news report as a stark graph illustrating the inexorable rise of global temperatures. Competitors could engage in "review bombing" to sabotage a rival's product. The algorithm can provide the scale and the personalization, but the human curator can provide the taste, the context, the storytelling, and the trust that we, as social creatures, still deeply crave. The psychologist Barry Schwartz famously termed this the "paradox of choice.