Joshua Vogelstein writes:
Are you aware of a paper the explains current best practice of figure generation, in general? i’m thinking things like: have legends and labels that are legible, etc. seems like you or hadley shoulda written some such thing by now….
My reply:
A couple of sources I can think of are: one of the appendixes in my book with Jennifer, and the book by Rafe Donahue.
In this post over at Simply Stats we talk about when a figure is too complicated: http://simplystatistics.tumblr.com/post/21788747340/how-do-i-know-if-my-figure-is-too-complicated. A very thoughtful comment by Karl Broman follows.
Jeff:
I used to want to make graphs that were super-amazing, that contained tons of information in a single plot. But over the years I’ve shifted toward preferring small multiples of less crowded plots. You can see lots of examples in my Red State Blue State book.