Chart Craft
A track of P14 · Data Visualization & Communication.
What the eye ranks well, choosing the form the task needs, honest scales and legends, colour that everyone can read, and how charts mislead - taught from the maker's seat.
Chart craft is usually taught as a gallery of chart types to copy. This track refuses that. It starts one level down, from how human vision actually reads a graphic, and derives the choices from there — so you can reason about a chart you have never seen before instead of matching it to a template.
It opens with the perception ranking: position is read almost exactly, length nearly so, then angle, then area, then colour — and you will see, on the same two numbers drawn two ways, how much an area encoding under-reads. Then choosing the form: map the task (comparison, trend, distribution, part-of-whole, relationship) to the encoding that serves it, and recognise when a table beats any chart. Scales, axes and legends come next — the zero-baseline rule, when a log scale earns its place, why dual axes almost always mislead. Then colour and accessibility: categorical vs sequential vs diverging, and a simulator that shows when a palette collapses for a colour-blind reader. It closes on the misleading-charts workshop, taught from the maker's seat — truncation, cherry-picked windows and area tricks, each built and then repaired, with the lie factor put to a number.