“Keep it simple” is NOT good chart-design advice

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:

1. 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 make simple charts will solve the problem. In reality, of course, almost all chart creators do realize 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.
2. 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? Here’s a list of my upcoming open-registration workshops.

To be notified of articles like this in the future, consider subscribing to my email list (one to three emails per month to level up your data visualization and dashboard design chops).