WTF…? Am I suggesting that chart creators should make charts that are needlessly complicated?

No, but there are two reasons why I don’t think “keep it simple” is good advice:

This advice assumes that the reason why so many charts are needlessly complicated is that chart creators don’t realize that they should try to make simple charts, and, therefore, that simply telling them to “keep it simple” will solve the problem. In reality, of course, almost all chart creators already know that they should avoid making charts needlessly complicated; it’s just that their charts often turn out that way despite their best efforts. Telling chart creators to “keep it simple,” then, is useless advice: in the vast majority of cases, they’re already trying to do that.
Creating “simple” charts is much harder than it sounds. Telling a chart creator to “keep it simple” is like telling a student driver to “avoid traffic accidents.” Well, yes, obviously, but how, exactly, does one do that? While avoiding accidents sounds simple, it requires learning hundreds of rules of the road and days of training and practice.

When it comes to creating charts, it takes me about 14 hours to teach someone how to “keep it simple” in my Practical Charts course. Creating charts that look simple and straightforward to audiences requires knowing how to choose from among about 50 common chart types, how to decide how wide or narrow to make quantitative scales, how to choose colors, how to formulate effective chart titles and callouts, and a slew of other skills that many chart creators have never learned, and that require hours or days to master.

Telling a chart creator to “keep it simple,” then, is kind of like telling them to “design good charts.”

Umm… thanks (?)

BTW…

Interested in taking my Practical Charts and/or Practical Dashboards course to become a true dataviz pro? Registration is now open for my upcoming live, open-registration workshop in May. I hope to see you (online) there!