Wait, is it parody? I would agree if it was, but I assumed it was serious, and kinda bad. Their “knowledge maps” page on the site looks similar - the examples are ugly & awful. https://www.visual-literacy.org/maps/ This all looks like it’s intended to be serious, considered good by the authors, especially considering the associated academic publication, and not some kind of intentionally funny commentary on bad visualizations. If that’s the case, it doesn’t seem particularly brilliant.
Aside from the nonsensical analogy to the periodic table (which they admit in the paper), the thing that bugs me about it is that it’s nowhere near complete, it does not cover all basic elements of visualization (also which they are aware of and discuss in the paper), so just completely misses the fundamental idea. It amounts to a hundred random examples of info-viz, most of which look mediocre to bad.
oh my. Maybe it is? The university they're attached to seems to be a real, serious, school. But these examples are just...worst of the worst stuff. Inscrutable metaphors, wasted axes, variable fonts without meaning, organization schemes that make no sense...the tribute to Ben Shneiderman literally breaks most of his interface design rules and his goals and theories on infoviz. [1]
I understand that much of this material is relatively old, but we actually were better back then.
The "tell" to me (if this is parody) is the percent of the audience here who can't tell if this is serious, or good, or not.
Perhaps somebody should count the comments and put them in a pie chart inside of a pie store and call it "HN taste tests visual-literacy.org".
Okay, I'm calling it, this is a very inside joke page of some sort.
Aside from the nonsensical analogy to the periodic table (which they admit in the paper), the thing that bugs me about it is that it’s nowhere near complete, it does not cover all basic elements of visualization (also which they are aware of and discuss in the paper), so just completely misses the fundamental idea. It amounts to a hundred random examples of info-viz, most of which look mediocre to bad.