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>Tufte dismisses these types of patterns as "chartjunk" and "unintentional optical art"

What Tufte doesn't understand is that your end goal isn't always information density and great insight.

Sometimes aesthetics can be equally or more important than the data.

Especially if the data are crap, like 90% of charts used in marketing (), where the marketing part is more important that actually showing something with the chart.

() Personal observation, YMMV.

I think tufte understands that people make junk charts on purpose. I think he just doesn't agree that it's a good chart if the purpose isn't to actually inform truthfully . If your data is crap and you know it then basically you are misleading people on purpose. At that point it doesn't really matter if you have a lot of chartjunk as well.