The Misleading-Charts Workshop

You can lie with a chart without faking a single number. That is the unsettling lesson this workshop teaches from the inside. Every trick here uses real data, clean arithmetic and a perfectly ordinary chart type — and still leaves the reader believing something false. A truncated axis turns a 5% wobble into a cliff. A cherry-picked window makes a rising series look like a crash. An area-sized icon blows a modest change out of all proportion. In statistical literacy you learned to spot these as a reader (P1 owns the reader's seat). Here you sit in the maker's seat: you build each distortion on purpose, put a number on exactly how much it lies, and then repair it — because the fastest way to become incapable of being fooled is to have made the lie yourself.