This should be a competitive sport, like gymnastics. He's attempting the bevel! With extra-wide lines! Very ambitious, but unfortunately he often fails to stick the corner alignments, the bevel distances are poorly controlled, and the data is unsuitably spiky for that choice of line joint. 7/10.

Fantastic read!

In the mid-2010s, I was interning at the German federal statistical office. Some of the team assistants were there since the 1980s/90s and had still learnt to use those tools as part of their vocational training. They also showed me the tools and the instructions for drawing exactly aligned tables by hand and the resulting bound sets of tables with hundreds of pages. Completely mind-boggling how much time they must have spent on a single project, now all automated away.

What I'm curious now is how one could use software (even PowerPoint) to make graphs that replicate that handmade aesthetic.

> A professional draftsman of the 1920's may cringe at the imperfections in my line graph above. They can suck it.

I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)

They look really good. I really enjoy looking at midcentury engineering charts/diagrams and stuff like jeppesen charts. NASA has a lot of good ones. The way the text looks, the line economy, the general aesthetic. Well worth the effort imo!

And here I thought drawing graphs in TikZ was doing it manually.

Love the article, this is why I browse HN.

What's been more interesting to me lately than using software to design data visualizations is learning to draw data by hand. It's a time consuming process but incredibly rewarding. The feeling of erasing graphite to reveal clean, crisp lines is something that software cannot recreate.

It’s nice to see something on HN that isn’t about writing a prompt so that you can pretend to work.