I love this send-up of the over-cluttered, dashboard style . There is a strong current of conservatism in what businesses want, which is why we get this kind of thing, I think. Yet they ignore the history of what has been truly successful, and assume that simple components will mean a simple whole — yet as you show here, the famous Minard graph is far simpler, and tells a unified story in a way a dashboard cannot — they leave far too much to the reader to piece together.

I also appreciate your description of the Grammar of Graphics, Ganes Kesari. But I’m not sure if understanding GoG will lead practitioners away from the decomposed dashboard style. You’re right that we all need to think about how to map our data onto visual details in more interesting ways. Does GoG really help with that? Maybe. More problematically, little charts are familiar, easy, and conservative enough to please business. If a designer or agency submitted the Minard graphic to a client, I bet it would be rejected 95% of the time as “too hard to read.” So maybe we need to do more education of viewers and clients, as much as anything. If that’s even possible.