I think some of the confusion that has arisen from Ed Tufte's work is that people read his book and then want to go make cool graphs of their own. But cool like Amis, not cool like Orwell. We each have our own styles, and I'm not trying to tell you what to do, just to help you look at your own writing and graphics so you can think harder about what you want your style to be.

Andrew Gelman at Statistical Modeling...

damn lies and good graphs

maybe they're right that crappy chartjunk graphs are better than crappy non-chartjunk graphs. But I don't think it's appropriate to generalize to the claim that chartjunk graphs are better than good graphs.

Is chartjunk undeservedly maligned? Possibly, said a recent post on Infosthetics. Andrew Gelman offers the critique I wish I'd written (instead of, shame, shame, frivolously linking without comment). The rest here.

From Dataviz, via Revolutions.

Obama recently appointed ET to the Recovery Independent Advisory Commission. Excelsior.

Jaegerman's graphics

Edward Tufte has a collection of news graphics by Megan Jaegerman here