Tufte Sparklines Photoshop Script
Sunday, February 24th, 2008A sparkline is a small line graph designed to be used in-line within text to illustrate a time series; the concept was developed by data presentation guru Edward Tufte. Here’s an example:
University of California 403(b) pension fund cumulative return Jan 1990-April 2004 (original data)
| Equities |  |
267% |
| Bonds |  |
154% |
The idea is to show, using minimal space, how a value varies over time. One advantage of sparklines’ compactness is that several can be used together to allow at-a-glance comparison between a set of time series. At Tufte’s web site there is a longer description of sparklines, with further examples, from a sample chapter of Tufte’s book, Beautiful Evidence. Sparklines are tangentially related to photography - they are used alongside images as a graphical design element in qualitative and quantitative analysis. (more…)
