Thursday, August 13, 2009
More WAR graphing fun!
Posted by Colin WyersFearless Leader's entry today on how to improve graphs has inspired some conversation at BtB and Tango's blog.
For the most part I agree with everything Dave says - I do think that having the WAR values on the y-axis is helpful, which is about my only reservation with his advice.
But.
His graphs were aliased, and it drove me insane.
Now - and please indulge me a personal aside here - but I really am geekier than I think even most of my readers know. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'm geekier than even the two or three readers who catch the "Babylon 5" references that the editors don't cut realize. (At least, I think one has survived.) And at varying points in my life, I've done things like, oh, four-color separation for printing presses.
And at the point today when I learned that Adobe Illustrator has graphing functionality, my doom was sealed.
So here's my effort at making a similar sort of graph, but using Illustrator (and some post-processing in Photoshop):
I don't think it's too bad for a first effort. I do know that I only used Illustrator's graphing capabilities about a quarter as well as I think they could be. So, somebody throw out some ideas for me here. I think I need some practice.
Colin Wyers knows exactly how much of a nerd he is. He is very interested in hearing about any other concerns you may have; you can reach him by e-mail, and he will try his best to respond in a timely fashion. He also blogs at Statistically Speaking.
“For the most part I agree with everything Dave says”
Suck-up.