It’s 2007. I was told there would be flying cars, replicators, and green women. Despite these lofty claims, we’re stuck with a moron president and a congress that won’t boot him, microwaves that give us brain cancer, and it’s still hard to make a decent graph.

Still.

Hard.

Data really wants to be seen. I’ve designed dozens of visualizations for data, and the execution for each and every one has always been pulling teeth. Options:

1. Go With a Framework.

There are lots of great frameworks you can use and some you can buy and some you can share. Thinkmap. Jung. FusionCharts. PhpCharts. Dundas. SSRS. ManyEyes.  Every single one of them is… close.  Visual constraints, data constraints, layout limits, embedding problems, data pre-munging, blah suck blah.  Dirty teases, the lot of ‘em, UNLESS what you want is what you’ve already seen somewhere else.

2. Draw it with Photoshop.
Exactly what you want! It looks exactly like what you dreamed!  It only took 50 hours of mindless clicking, is totally static, impossible to automate, impossible to reproduce without massive aesthetic subtractions and thousands of hours of dev time.

3. Build it from Scratch.

Thousands of hours of dev time.  Must rebuild everything everyone else has already done.  No standing on the shoulders of giants, instead you have to live up to them.  Groan.

4. Pay Someone Else to do It.

They’re going to do all three of the above, worse than you, for twice as much, behind schedule, and you’re still going to say GROAN.

It’s 2007.  Why are charts still so hard?

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