Sketchy plots

posted Thu 25 Oct 2012 by Michael Galloy under Visualization

Not sure where I would ever use it, but I would love to be able to produce these xkcd-style plots in IDL, currently available in Javascript with d3, R, and Python with matplotlib.

xkcd-style plot

An academic paper has been written about this and even provides a Processing implementation. From the abstract:

Results suggest that where a visualization is clearly sketchy, engagement may be increased and that attitudes to participating in visualization annotation are more positive.

So it appears that a plot that looks like a sketch indicates to viewers that it is not a “final” product.

1 Comment

One Response to “Sketchy plots”

Eugene says:
January 31st, 2013 at 4:16 pm
Very interesting. Let’s hope this can be a bonus feature for IDL9. Now for simple stuff, the only question is how to plot axes with xkcd style in IDL.

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Sketchy plots

One Response to “Sketchy plots”