As someone who’s spent a while designing charts for published books, I have generally been strongly against axis lines. One thing that has really influenced my approach to using lines is the section of Butterick’s Practical Typography on tables.
Nowadays I remove all lines on tables and charts unless there’s a strong argument in favor of one; implied lines are much easier on the eye.
This post overall moved me toward using gridlines a little bit more, for intuitively measuring distance when that’s important.
The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there’s no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.
If your only choices for gridlines are “off” and “obnoxious”, “off” seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.
I second this. Also, consider using instead of lines (or in addition to) an alternating pattern of white and light grey for the background. I love subtle grey/white background alternations for guiding the eye straight across a bunch of columns.
I’m a big fan of Butterick’s book (and Butterick’s stuff in general), and one of the things I appreciate about his guidelines is that he does well at distinguishing between hard-and-fast rules and mere heuristics or suggestions. For example, here, he correctly says: “In this example, cell borders are unnecessary. In other cases, they can be useful.” (Emphasis mine.)
Butterick’s example table has a mere four rows and columns. A larger table simply can’t do without some visual delineation. (But take a look at the linked table, and you may note that it doesn’t have lines[1] either—it has alternating row background colors. Meanwhile, the columns need no delineation, because the human eye is better at vertical alignment than horizontal alignment!)
But of course even that needs a caveat: the table has no lines between rows of body content, but does have lines separating table sections. Similarly, you could vary the weight of the lines, to create visual organization, such as in the tables on this page.
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of personal preference involved. Removing cell borders is obnoxious and inconvenient, the table below hurts. The table above has the borders a tad too thick, but removing them is a cure that’s, personally, worse than the disease.
As someone who’s spent a while designing charts for published books, I have generally been strongly against axis lines. One thing that has really influenced my approach to using lines is the section of Butterick’s Practical Typography on tables.
Nowadays I remove all lines on tables and charts unless there’s a strong argument in favor of one; implied lines are much easier on the eye.
This post overall moved me toward using gridlines a little bit more, for intuitively measuring distance when that’s important.
The cell borders example is misleading. The readability issue is not the cell borders themselves, the issue is that the borders are heavier weight than the text, and there’s no difference between the borders separating the row and column headers, and the borders separating the data rows and columns.
If your only choices for gridlines are “off” and “obnoxious”, “off” seems like a good choice. And for small tables, no borders works well. But for larger tables, finer lines (maybe in a lighter color or shade) can really improve the readability.
I second this. Also, consider using instead of lines (or in addition to) an alternating pattern of white and light grey for the background. I love subtle grey/white background alternations for guiding the eye straight across a bunch of columns.
I’m a big fan of Butterick’s book (and Butterick’s stuff in general), and one of the things I appreciate about his guidelines is that he does well at distinguishing between hard-and-fast rules and mere heuristics or suggestions. For example, here, he correctly says: “In this example, cell borders are unnecessary. In other cases, they can be useful.” (Emphasis mine.)
Butterick’s example table has a mere four rows and columns. A larger table simply can’t do without some visual delineation. (But take a look at the linked table, and you may note that it doesn’t have lines[1] either—it has alternating row background colors. Meanwhile, the columns need no delineation, because the human eye is better at vertical alignment than horizontal alignment!)
But of course even that needs a caveat: the table has no lines between rows of body content, but does have lines separating table sections. Similarly, you could vary the weight of the lines, to create visual organization, such as in the tables on this page.
Yeah, there seems to be a lot of personal preference involved. Removing cell borders is obnoxious and inconvenient, the table below hurts. The table above has the borders a tad too thick, but removing them is a cure that’s, personally, worse than the disease.