A couple of nits regarding the illustrations in the sample:
(They are very small nits that I wouldn’t normally bother people with, but you obviously put a lot of effort and taste into making this beautiful and mostly succeeded—I especially love how the line on the GDP graph goes into the space of the ordinate ticks. And while small annoyances might not be that important from an economic viewpoint—though see 2010s Apple—they just provoke an intense feeling of sadness from a craftsman’s viewpoint.)
The dismal state of plotting software (and the laziness / greed of scientific publishers) make us accept this in scientific papers, but still, the Xe±Y notation just looks unpolished in print. It is a good solution for ASCII- and keyboard-bound source code (though I’m still a bit sad that the Algol ⏨, U+23E8 DECIMAL EXPONENT SYMBOL, didn’t make it into ASCII and onto the PC keyboard), but not much else. It is especially disappointing to see, as in the sample, axis labels with 1e±Y (no other mantissas!) instead of just 10ʸ: I’ll admit X × 10ʸ can look awkward sometimes, but when X = 1 everywhere, even that excuse doesn’t work.
Even if you end up ignoring the previous point, I implore you, please at least change the character for negative exponents from the hyphen (centered roughly in the middle of a lowercase letter, short, thick, U+002D or U+2010) to the minus (like the plus, centered exactly in the middle of a lining figure, as long as a tabular figure, thin, U+2212). It shouldn’t change the layout in any significant way, but you can’t unsee this problem when you know it’s there (much easier than the XKCD-promoted bad kerning).
I wouldn’t notice this if I hadn’t fought with it on my own plots, but zoom in on the origin of the last plot (IQ to destroy the world), and you’ll see that the vertex of the right angle between the axes isn’t one: there’s what looks like a small white cutout (which might disappear in low-resolution printing). This is because the axes were specified to the drawing software as two separate lines, and it isn’t smart enough to (or trusts the artist enough not to) infer that it should join them, even though they (almost?) share an endpoint.
Finally, more of a wat than even a nit, but if you look very closely at the ordinate tick labels on the GDP graph, you’ll see that their right zeros don’t line up a really tiny teensy bit. Not really a problem, but I’m frankly stumped as to how that could ever happen (and would be disturbed if my plotting code did it).
I was the lead designer on making these graphs, and I found this feedback pretty useful. Thanks!
Most of my response is “I’m a beginner, I’m still learning, and trying to ship things fast means making a bunch of sacrifices. Boy could I point out even worse things that would drive you crazy not being able to unsee them!” :)
One reason for these (e.g. 4) is that the graphs were first plotted using Vega-lite in ObservableHQ, and then exported and retouched in Adobe Illustrator.
A couple of nits regarding the illustrations in the sample:
(They are very small nits that I wouldn’t normally bother people with, but you obviously put a lot of effort and taste into making this beautiful and mostly succeeded—I especially love how the line on the GDP graph goes into the space of the ordinate ticks. And while small annoyances might not be that important from an economic viewpoint—though see 2010s Apple—they just provoke an intense feeling of sadness from a craftsman’s viewpoint.)
The dismal state of plotting software (and the laziness / greed of scientific publishers) make us accept this in scientific papers, but still, the Xe±Y notation just looks unpolished in print. It is a good solution for ASCII- and keyboard-bound source code (though I’m still a bit sad that the Algol ⏨, U+23E8 DECIMAL EXPONENT SYMBOL, didn’t make it into ASCII and onto the PC keyboard), but not much else. It is especially disappointing to see, as in the sample, axis labels with 1e±Y (no other mantissas!) instead of just 10ʸ: I’ll admit X × 10ʸ can look awkward sometimes, but when X = 1 everywhere, even that excuse doesn’t work.
Even if you end up ignoring the previous point, I implore you, please at least change the character for negative exponents from the hyphen (centered roughly in the middle of a lowercase letter, short, thick, U+002D or U+2010) to the minus (like the plus, centered exactly in the middle of a lining figure, as long as a tabular figure, thin, U+2212). It shouldn’t change the layout in any significant way, but you can’t unsee this problem when you know it’s there (much easier than the XKCD-promoted bad kerning).
I wouldn’t notice this if I hadn’t fought with it on my own plots, but zoom in on the origin of the last plot (IQ to destroy the world), and you’ll see that the vertex of the right angle between the axes isn’t one: there’s what looks like a small white cutout (which might disappear in low-resolution printing). This is because the axes were specified to the drawing software as two separate lines, and it isn’t smart enough to (or trusts the artist enough not to) infer that it should join them, even though they (almost?) share an endpoint.
Finally, more of a wat than even a nit, but if you look very closely at the ordinate tick labels on the GDP graph, you’ll see that their right zeros don’t line up a really tiny teensy bit. Not really a problem, but I’m frankly stumped as to how that could ever happen (and would be disturbed if my plotting code did it).
I was the lead designer on making these graphs, and I found this feedback pretty useful. Thanks!
Most of my response is “I’m a beginner, I’m still learning, and trying to ship things fast means making a bunch of sacrifices. Boy could I point out even worse things that would drive you crazy not being able to unsee them!” :)
One reason for these (e.g. 4) is that the graphs were first plotted using Vega-lite in ObservableHQ, and then exported and retouched in Adobe Illustrator.