I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand.
One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.
A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.
I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.
Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.
Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.
> Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
With 6H you get lighter line, but only in colour. It can be actually harder to erase, because you naturally tend to push the pencil harder to see it, thus denting the paper and leaving the graphite at the bottom of a groove where the eraser cannot lift it. Those harder leads have great amounts of clay that very easily scratch the paper.
I go on the opposite direction, being my favorite lead a 4B: you need very low pressure to leave visible marks, that you can erase very easily with a kneaded eraser.
You are right that a 6H will hold the tip for way longer. Only if I don't need to remove the marks I would use the harder leads.
You definitely have to let the tool do the work with the harder lead for that exact reason. I'm typically going for really faint lines, and I don't erase or ink anyway. I usually get into the groove trap when I'm going over my lines to darken them with a softer pencil, which suggests I should go softer still.
I'm old enough that I took drafting in 7th grade. One tip I remember is to turn the pencil slightly as you use it. I think this was to help maintain the pencil's shape, but there my be other less obvious reasons.
I took woodshop too. The shop teacher seemed to enjoy scaring us with stories of the students that goofed off in shop to horrific consequences. That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
> That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road on a hill covered in corn snow without walking the path first to make sure you can get out or get back up. 4: When looking for a winter campsite for your Boy Scout troop, tell your parents where you're going.
That is fun! As an aside, it took me four times clicking into that before I realized there was an expandable-but-collapsed product detail section that included the rotation information I was looking for.
This takes me back, as well as some of the replies to your post. I still have most of my drafting tools from high school, including eraser shields, etc. one thing I didn't see you mention, and would help with dingy vellum, is a pouch with eraser granules you squeeze to put a thin layer of dust on your drawing. This will pick up excess graphite as you slide your t-square or parallel over the drawing.
I used one of these bizarre pouches as a gentle final pass to clean up drawings. The graphite "smear" from the t-square happened with every drawing - thanks for sharing this top. Before starting a new drawing I would wipe down the tools to start fresh!
I own one, but it's an almost completely different tool. The fat lead doesn't stay sharp, and isn't really something you'd use for drafting or drawing figures for inking. They are great for marking lumber though.
Finding tools that clicked was a nice process to discover. I also tried harder leads and like them for the reasons you mention - but for whatever reason, kept coming back to a basic BIC mechanical pencil.
An eraser shield is a good addition to the tools list - that came in handy often.
Love the tracing paper tip - that’d be helpful to remove the digital aspect of taking a picture a digitally sketching on top.
Yeah, you're working a little finer than I am. Drawing furniture full or half scale, I'm not too bothered by a thicker line as the pencil dulls. Drawing a graph, I'd probably want a more consistently fine line too.
I like the basic Pentel P205/207/209 pencils, but the basically disposable plastic Bics would probably be well suited to the short, brutal life they'd lead in the shop.
Loved the article and the joy of the process. The outcome is spectacular and shows the care that went into it.
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.
Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship.
Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kisshttps://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...
(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)
This is exactly what I hoped for when writing this article. The "Atlas de statistique graphique de la ville de Paris" from 1889 has stunning hand drafted data visuals I may have never seen unless you shared. Thank you for making an account and adding to this catalog of resources about data viz. I plan to add this to the list in my next update.
If you enjoyed this I'd highly recommend checking out A Semiology of Graphics[0]. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned in the article, but I recognize the article was less about types of data visualization than it was about how we create data vis.
What a astonishing and intrsting journey! Nowadays with AI with software everyone is rushing in everywhere everydays. Especially the AI come out. Sometimes in this life. We forgot how we feel this world and hot to do something in one heart. Your story tell me that. Why the world need so fast? Why we can't just enjoy the process of doing things, rather than just focusing on the result.
This may me wonder that. Why people like things to be done so quick? Because life is short. You can do limit of things in your life. So just do as many as possible.
Why? Why we can't just slow it down. Why we just enjoy the life. Is that we slow down we can't survive? Is we slow down that we will left behind? So be it! Just change a life, maybe is difficault, maybe is hard. But you slow down. you can concentrate to do one thing. You can enjoy the prccess. May be meet some beautiful thing.
I envy you can focus on one thing for 50 hours straight. This is what we can't do in this noisy, rush, busy plase in this very downtown.
A comment from who live in a city and cage here can't getaway.
Kerning is staggeringly difficult to do manually with stencils, and at the same time the imperfections show "touch" which is part of what makes TFA's work so appealing.
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.
That seems like a valuable internship. I think the documentation in books about hand drafting techniques only contains so much information. How much knowledge was passed from professionals to apprentices alone? And does this knowledge disappear when they leave us?
Thanks, the article puts into perspective the Bret Victor's point about William Playfair, who invented many of the data diagrams we use today, including the line graph. It was strange to see something as basic to how we think about data was invented only in late 18th century. But seeing the amount of work you put to design them properly clarifies the amount of creative thinking that was required to get something like this going on.
I'd also wish more graphs would come with this level of detail as this image from the article [0]. It would be so useful to see precisely where the data points are and how the line and interpolation are constructed.
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
Thanks for sharing! Today I discovered the Jibun Techo. Always great to discover products made by people who put so much thought and craft in. Not surprising the Japanese excel in this art.
Set the mood for today.
Unfortunately can't upvote.. your karma says 6666. May return when the spell is broken.
And remember that perfection is the enemy of the good. I needed a little bit of drafting to design a sun room and started looking at software options. I didn't immediately like anything so I grabbed a ruler and a piece of paper and drew what I wanted pretty quickly using the standard 1/4"=1' scale. Precision is actually unimportant, everything will need to be fitted by the builder in the end, even if an architect measured and drew everything in AutoCAD/Revit. But very quickly you can get good results without even a drafting table and T-square. I have the T-square and triangles, but didn't have the space to work with them, and I'm happy enough with the result.
I did technical drawing at school (pre computers... pencil, paper, t-square, compass, etc). It really was quite fun constructing things with pencil and paper. I think one good thing about it is you'd end up with a very intimate understanding of the thing you are designing because every tiny aspect took you mental effort to construct. I also think it really helped me understand projecting 3d into 2d, though on my old Atari 800XL, that was tricky and I dreamed of the day of high resolution screens...like 800x600 and 256 colors :)
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!
I'm glad I'm not the only who seemingly has a taste for "older" diagrams from that period. It makes me think of the same aesthetic roots of what's now called "cassette futurism" or "NASA-punk". Older engineering charts really feel like there was more care and thought put into each line or facet, even though I'm sure it's a trick of time.
Certainly reminds me of the fonts produced by the vintage lettering kits.
What if for digital fonts, there was a way to write the same letter 2 or more different ways? Adding slight variations to the same letter would mimic the effect of using hand tools.
I think OpenType allows for this! Most font designers don’t take advantage though, since even two variants per glyph means 2x the design work and 2x the file size. It would be cool to see it done more though.
I absolutely love the graphs that were used in old medical physiology papers. Something about the hand-drawn nature makes you appreciate both the underlying concept the graph is trying to convey as well as the work that went into it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge techie. I love computers and computer graphics, but sometimes a hand-drawn graph just takes the cake.
The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion.
My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches.
I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.
As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.
Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.
I try to “think with a pencil” every single day - I’m excited to browse this book. When digging into hand drawn data viz I did not have older software on my mind. It’s analogous to this project and something I’m excited to try - and maybe, it won’t take 50 hours. Thank you for sharing these.
Never, ever ask for forgiveness for, purely for the love of it, learning skills and creating by hand anything that can be mass-produced. Learning and craftsmanship are their own rewards.
With the advent of AI, I’d expect these resources to become a goldmine within about 20 years. Libraries will become hives of activity as dens of nostalgia.
Seeing the artistry involved in old "paperwork" also helps drive home how years of computing (and printing) technology has dramatically reduced the "price per diagram."
Even if they aren't always as nice, a kid can have graphs for weekly homework that would have been hours of work by a professional back then.
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.
What do you use to erase pencil? The words "Using an eraser and a light touch" suggest a gum or a vynil eraser. I make a ball with the kneaded eraser and roll it with the palm against the paper.
I found myself using the Prismacolor Artgum eraser the most. It had a nice way of shedding the used parts and staying clean. I like the kneaded erasers too but I tend to dirty them up too much.
This is a lovely toy project. But please do not do this for real; imperfections - even minute imperfections - in data visualisations have consequences. 'Non-techy' people take for granted shapes and lines over numbers and sequences simply because computers are accurate. Correctness of data is a separate matter of course
Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.
matplotlib has an xkcd style for a different sort of handmade aesthetic. And as reluctant as I am to bring this up as a comment to this post, “plot xyz and make the graph look like it was published in the financial times (but without ripping off their visual brand)” is a remarkably effective prompt after a little tweaking and I imagine something similar would work for other styles.
I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.
I've taught digital art classes too. I was pleasantly surprised at a writing assignment where most students (un-prompted) turned in a hand-written response.
I ended up dropping my drawing class because I kept getting docked points for my handwriting no matter how much I practiced. I think I was on track for a B or C.
You can see the full work in his other blog post[0]. There you can clearly see that red circles coincide with vertical blue lines on the graph. And the very fine print in the bottom left corner explains that "Displayed years indicate when Coffee Maker computers were built". Overlapping the red points with title text is probably just a stylistic choice.
I build furniture and while I do my design work digitally for remote clients, I do my shop drawings by hand.
One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
I prefer lead holders to wooden pencils. They take 2mm lead, and you sharpen them with a lead pointer. K&E pointers are readily available on eBay, as are the abrasive cups that do the actual sharpening. The plastic trash can ones will get the job done, but are unsatisfying from a tactile standpoint.
A decent lead holder is a trick to find. The Alvin one I bought is too loose and the lead slips up into it. The Staedtler one doesn't close tightly at the tip and support the lead well enough to prevent breaking. The Prismacolor one is satisfactory, and I inherited a vintage one that I love from the aforementioned draftsman.
I recommend an erasing shield to make revising your pencil work without erasing too much. Another person I know with an art background tipped me off to putting tracing paper over your main drawing to iterate on details before committing them to paper to reduce erasing.
Drafting vellum is pretty forgiving of erasing, but it has a toothier surface that can get a little dingy if you're working on a drawing for a while. I've never tried Bristol board; I don't need immaculate drawings for reproduction, just good enough ones to build from.
Happy drawing. It's an immensely satisfying process for me. If you're detail oriented, you'll likely find it enjoyable too.
> Like 6H to 9H. You'll get a much lighter line to erase later. It'll also hold a finer point for longer.
With 6H you get lighter line, but only in colour. It can be actually harder to erase, because you naturally tend to push the pencil harder to see it, thus denting the paper and leaving the graphite at the bottom of a groove where the eraser cannot lift it. Those harder leads have great amounts of clay that very easily scratch the paper.
I go on the opposite direction, being my favorite lead a 4B: you need very low pressure to leave visible marks, that you can erase very easily with a kneaded eraser.
You are right that a 6H will hold the tip for way longer. Only if I don't need to remove the marks I would use the harder leads.
You definitely have to let the tool do the work with the harder lead for that exact reason. I'm typically going for really faint lines, and I don't erase or ink anyway. I usually get into the groove trap when I'm going over my lines to darken them with a softer pencil, which suggests I should go softer still.
I'm old enough that I took drafting in 7th grade. One tip I remember is to turn the pencil slightly as you use it. I think this was to help maintain the pencil's shape, but there my be other less obvious reasons.
I took woodshop too. The shop teacher seemed to enjoy scaring us with stories of the students that goofed off in shop to horrific consequences. That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
> That's also where I learned to be careful with air compressors around open wounds.
That sounds like you may have learned the same way I learned that 1: when a USGS topo map indicates an unimproved road, it may be out of date, 2: don't take your father's four-wheel-drive truck down a late-winter, corn-snow-covered dirt road when the temperature is starting to drop in the late afternoon 3: Don't go down a dirt road on a hill covered in corn snow without walking the path first to make sure you can get out or get back up. 4: When looking for a winter campsite for your Boy Scout troop, tell your parents where you're going.
Haha! Made me chuckle
There are fun japanese mechanical pencils that have built-in rotation: https://www.unibrands.co/collections/kuru-toga
That is fun! As an aside, it took me four times clicking into that before I realized there was an expandable-but-collapsed product detail section that included the rotation information I was looking for.
Make your web sites obvious, people!
This takes me back, as well as some of the replies to your post. I still have most of my drafting tools from high school, including eraser shields, etc. one thing I didn't see you mention, and would help with dingy vellum, is a pouch with eraser granules you squeeze to put a thin layer of dust on your drawing. This will pick up excess graphite as you slide your t-square or parallel over the drawing.
I used one of these bizarre pouches as a gentle final pass to clean up drawings. The graphite "smear" from the t-square happened with every drawing - thanks for sharing this top. Before starting a new drawing I would wipe down the tools to start fresh!
Btw, construction tools have thicker lead holders, like 5.6mm, and red color too.
https://www.homedepot.com/b/Tools-Hand-Tools-Marking-Tools-L...
I own one, but it's an almost completely different tool. The fat lead doesn't stay sharp, and isn't really something you'd use for drafting or drawing figures for inking. They are great for marking lumber though.
Finding tools that clicked was a nice process to discover. I also tried harder leads and like them for the reasons you mention - but for whatever reason, kept coming back to a basic BIC mechanical pencil.
An eraser shield is a good addition to the tools list - that came in handy often.
Love the tracing paper tip - that’d be helpful to remove the digital aspect of taking a picture a digitally sketching on top.
Yeah, you're working a little finer than I am. Drawing furniture full or half scale, I'm not too bothered by a thicker line as the pencil dulls. Drawing a graph, I'd probably want a more consistently fine line too.
I like the basic Pentel P205/207/209 pencils, but the basically disposable plastic Bics would probably be well suited to the short, brutal life they'd lead in the shop.
Loved the article and the joy of the process. The outcome is spectacular and shows the care that went into it.
> One super helpful tip I got from an actual trained draftsman is to use harder pencil lead for your layout and construction lines. Like 6H to 9H.
I should try that. I got the exact opposite advice in university, and I have terrible line thicknesses.
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.
I can't be the only one who read this in that old-timey radio voice
My mind went to Jerry Seinfeld imitating one in a bit.
When you say bevel, do you mean the miter limit?
The miterlimit just controls when to change between a miter join and a bevel join.
Wait until you hear about compulsory figures in figure skating.
I loved hearing this comment in my mind :)
Amazing process (such patience in this day and age!), and special thanks for sharing links to the data viz books! Tufte was my gateway too but I didn’t think to look into books on technical sketching, engineering drawing, and draftsmanship.
Love hand-drawn viz, recently I’ve been looking at the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) and they have a great collection of all their reports, from pre-1900s to now. I especially appreciate this beautiful one about people with mental illness in the Seine department… from 1889. The typography is chef’s kiss https://www.bnsp.insee.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b52510983q/f49.item...
(After years of reading Hacker News this post motivated me to finally make an account and upvote. Data viz is so fun)
This is exactly what I hoped for when writing this article. The "Atlas de statistique graphique de la ville de Paris" from 1889 has stunning hand drafted data visuals I may have never seen unless you shared. Thank you for making an account and adding to this catalog of resources about data viz. I plan to add this to the list in my next update.
Thanks for the link to this archive. A very welcome contribution very a propos in relation to the article.
An amateur of old hand drawn maps (Michelin road, and older).
If you enjoyed this I'd highly recommend checking out A Semiology of Graphics[0]. I was a little surprised to not see it mentioned in the article, but I recognize the article was less about types of data visualization than it was about how we create data vis.
[0]: https://books.google.com/books/about/Semiology_of_Graphics.h...
I dream of stumbling across a book like this in the used book store... I'm striking out finding a digital copy or availability at libraries.
What a astonishing and intrsting journey! Nowadays with AI with software everyone is rushing in everywhere everydays. Especially the AI come out. Sometimes in this life. We forgot how we feel this world and hot to do something in one heart. Your story tell me that. Why the world need so fast? Why we can't just enjoy the process of doing things, rather than just focusing on the result.
This may me wonder that. Why people like things to be done so quick? Because life is short. You can do limit of things in your life. So just do as many as possible.
Why? Why we can't just slow it down. Why we just enjoy the life. Is that we slow down we can't survive? Is we slow down that we will left behind? So be it! Just change a life, maybe is difficault, maybe is hard. But you slow down. you can concentrate to do one thing. You can enjoy the prccess. May be meet some beautiful thing.
I envy you can focus on one thing for 50 hours straight. This is what we can't do in this noisy, rush, busy plase in this very downtown.
A comment from who live in a city and cage here can't getaway.
The amount of typos in your post… cheers!
Which saying that I'm not using AI to post lol
> 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)
The kerning deserves the criticism - I'm glad someone said it :)
Kerning is staggeringly difficult to do manually with stencils, and at the same time the imperfections show "touch" which is part of what makes TFA's work so appealing.
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.
That seems like a valuable internship. I think the documentation in books about hand drafting techniques only contains so much information. How much knowledge was passed from professionals to apprentices alone? And does this knowledge disappear when they leave us?
This the most hackernews post I've ever seen. Doing something in 50 hours that could have taken 20 minutes because vibe.
I love it.
The peak irony is that most of us work in a field that exists so that people don't need to do that stuff for 50 hours.
Thanks, the article puts into perspective the Bret Victor's point about William Playfair, who invented many of the data diagrams we use today, including the line graph. It was strange to see something as basic to how we think about data was invented only in late 18th century. But seeing the amount of work you put to design them properly clarifies the amount of creative thinking that was required to get something like this going on.
I'd also wish more graphs would come with this level of detail as this image from the article [0]. It would be so useful to see precisely where the data points are and how the line and interpolation are constructed.
[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/images/hand-drawn-data-outline...
You should add in Calvin Schmid's Handbook of Graphic Presentation into your list Doug -- https://archive.org/details/HandbookOfGraphicPresentation/pa...
Unfortunately I do not see specific discussion of how to make the lines a consistent thickness. It does have notes on how to sharpen your pencil and how to use a carpenters spline to draw smooth curves though.
Technical drawings pens are held upright and have a circular tip that gives a specific line width based on the diameter of the tip.
If you're inking your drawings, you probably don't need to worry all that much about the exact line width and consistency of your pencil work.
N.b. I don't ink my drawings. I've used drafting pens a couple times to experiment, but it's not part of my regular workflow.
https://www.jetpens.com/blog/The-Best-Technical-Drawing-Pens
Thanks for sharing! Today I discovered the Jibun Techo. Always great to discover products made by people who put so much thought and craft in. Not surprising the Japanese excel in this art.
Set the mood for today.
Unfortunately can't upvote.. your karma says 6666. May return when the spell is broken.
This will be an excellent addition to the list. Curve lines are a challenge I have yet to tackle in depth.
You may also like Information Graphics: https://www.taschen.com/en/books/graphic-design/44653/inform...
> lines a consistent thickness
A "ruling pen" would help. It's like a fountain pen where you can adjust the width of the ink.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruling_pen
And remember that perfection is the enemy of the good. I needed a little bit of drafting to design a sun room and started looking at software options. I didn't immediately like anything so I grabbed a ruler and a piece of paper and drew what I wanted pretty quickly using the standard 1/4"=1' scale. Precision is actually unimportant, everything will need to be fitted by the builder in the end, even if an architect measured and drew everything in AutoCAD/Revit. But very quickly you can get good results without even a drafting table and T-square. I have the T-square and triangles, but didn't have the space to work with them, and I'm happy enough with the result.
I did technical drawing at school (pre computers... pencil, paper, t-square, compass, etc). It really was quite fun constructing things with pencil and paper. I think one good thing about it is you'd end up with a very intimate understanding of the thing you are designing because every tiny aspect took you mental effort to construct. I also think it really helped me understand projecting 3d into 2d, though on my old Atari 800XL, that was tricky and I dreamed of the day of high resolution screens...like 800x600 and 256 colors :)
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!
I'm glad I'm not the only who seemingly has a taste for "older" diagrams from that period. It makes me think of the same aesthetic roots of what's now called "cassette futurism" or "NASA-punk". Older engineering charts really feel like there was more care and thought put into each line or facet, even though I'm sure it's a trick of time.
I was a big fan of two fonts (Draft Paper and Parts List) by Beth Matthews [0] that call back to this era, you might enjoy them as well.
[0]: https://www.bethmathews.com/shop/partslistdraftpaperfontbund...
Certainly reminds me of the fonts produced by the vintage lettering kits.
What if for digital fonts, there was a way to write the same letter 2 or more different ways? Adding slight variations to the same letter would mimic the effect of using hand tools.
I think OpenType allows for this! Most font designers don’t take advantage though, since even two variants per glyph means 2x the design work and 2x the file size. It would be cool to see it done more though.
And here I thought drawing graphs in TikZ was doing it manually.
Love the article, this is why I browse HN.
Learning about something like TikZ is exactly what I hoped for from writing this article. Thank you for sharing.
I absolutely love the graphs that were used in old medical physiology papers. Something about the hand-drawn nature makes you appreciate both the underlying concept the graph is trying to convey as well as the work that went into it. Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge techie. I love computers and computer graphics, but sometimes a hand-drawn graph just takes the cake.
The list of books was welcome, and the work is impressive. I always made do with section pad and a hard pencil and a simple stencil, but it wasn't for camera ready publication use or anything. Just visualisation and discussion.
My book suggestion is more illustration than technical drawing but still has a 1940s/50s vibe: Thinking with a Pencil by Henning Helms. Covers illustrations, tracing, tables, maps and diagrams as well as 3d sketches.
I gather that Tufte was influenced by John Tukey's 1977 book Exploratory Data Analysis which introduces the box and whisker plot, dot plot and so on.
As to software, another poster has mentioned Tikz (usually used with LaTeX) and yes it is amazingly flexible and can produce just about any kind of plot (or diagram) you want. But there are older tools such as the groff (GNU Troff) system's pic and a pre-processor for pic called grap which is much more barebones. The latter was also influenced by Tukey's book. The groff/pic/tbl/eqn/grap install is something like 30Mb and it is available in most Linux distribution package repositories.
https://www.lunabase.org/~faber/Vault/software/grap/example/
Oh and remember star charts for astronomers! Many hand plotted before the photographic surveys were produced. Norton's Star Atlas is a famous one (prior to the 2000.0 epoch edition) that was hand drawn.
I try to “think with a pencil” every single day - I’m excited to browse this book. When digging into hand drawn data viz I did not have older software on my mind. It’s analogous to this project and something I’m excited to try - and maybe, it won’t take 50 hours. Thank you for sharing these.
Never, ever ask for forgiveness for, purely for the love of it, learning skills and creating by hand anything that can be mass-produced. Learning and craftsmanship are their own rewards.
I (perhaps mistakenly) saw the article as metaphor.
50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.
Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!
(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)
Powerpoint will soon be a lost craft.
With the advent of AI, I’d expect these resources to become a goldmine within about 20 years. Libraries will become hives of activity as dens of nostalgia.
This is my favourite kind of post here
Same. Any kind of hyper fixation is infinitely more interesting than AI bullshit.
I don't even think it's a hyperfixation, it's just putting time into a craft (which is also vanishing these days)
There is a hyperfixation on AI to the point you can't even read a post about drawing graphs by hand without it coming up!
Seeing the artistry involved in old "paperwork" also helps drive home how years of computing (and printing) technology has dramatically reduced the "price per diagram."
Even if they aren't always as nice, a kid can have graphs for weekly homework that would have been hours of work by a professional back then.
One day I wish to be in a stable enough place that it's possible for me to pursue activities like these. It's a true privilege
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.
What do you use to erase pencil? The words "Using an eraser and a light touch" suggest a gum or a vynil eraser. I make a ball with the kneaded eraser and roll it with the palm against the paper.
I use the Pentel Hi-Polymer eraser. Minimal abrasion of the paper, clean removal of graphite.
I found myself using the Prismacolor Artgum eraser the most. It had a nice way of shedding the used parts and staying clean. I like the kneaded erasers too but I tend to dirty them up too much.
This is a lovely toy project. But please do not do this for real; imperfections - even minute imperfections - in data visualisations have consequences. 'Non-techy' people take for granted shapes and lines over numbers and sequences simply because computers are accurate. Correctness of data is a separate matter of course
And your coffee-maker apparently still had all its coffee when it finally got back from from Russia!
(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)
Very nice and a beautiful result.
Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.
What do you use?
My dad had that lettering kit! Even look like exactly that model and typography.
What I'm curious now is how one could use software (even PowerPoint) to make graphs that replicate that handmade aesthetic.
matplotlib has an xkcd style for a different sort of handmade aesthetic. And as reluctant as I am to bring this up as a comment to this post, “plot xyz and make the graph look like it was published in the financial times (but without ripping off their visual brand)” is a remarkably effective prompt after a little tweaking and I imagine something similar would work for other styles.
Short and simple: slow work teaches you things automation hides.
Nicely written and I thought D3.js was very verbose and time consuming. Makes me appreciate all the computational tooling we have today.
I teach digital art and am also a painter. When I was a student I loved filling sketchbooks with drawings - like a collection of ideas. To a large degree my web bookmarks and screen grab library have taken over this function. That being said, if I want to quickly communicate visual ideas to students or craftsmen I much prefer a paper and pencil. It feels so much more nuanced, comfortable and expressive.
I've taught digital art classes too. I was pleasantly surprised at a writing assignment where most students (un-prompted) turned in a hand-written response.
Reminds me of the movie the great arch where the main lead who was an architect refused to use computer simulations.
It’s nice to see something on HN that isn’t about writing a prompt so that you can pretend to work.
Username checks out
Delightful!
While not as authentic as a hand-drawn chart, I find Decker can produce HyperCard-like graphs nicely.
Never heard of Decker - I can tell I'm gonna have fun with it. Thanks for sharing.
Fantastic article! Reminded me of my favorite engineering drawing class from the undergrad days.
I ended up dropping my drawing class because I kept getting docked points for my handwriting no matter how much I practiced. I think I was on track for a B or C.
This was indeed a polarized class with the majority hating it with passion!
This reminds me of the great pleasure I got from technical drawing at school.
Reminds me of https://www.dear-data.com/theproject
Classic.
Love it. Are any of your viz up for sale?
Heh. Which if y'all borrowed the Tufte book?
It's ok, I can wait...
Great article, enjoyed reading it.
Does he explain what the red dots in the titles of his work are meant to be? Possibly I didn’t read carefully enough
You can see the full work in his other blog post[0]. There you can clearly see that red circles coincide with vertical blue lines on the graph. And the very fine print in the bottom left corner explains that "Displayed years indicate when Coffee Maker computers were built". Overlapping the red points with title text is probably just a stylistic choice.
[0] https://www.dougmacdowell.com/hand-drawn-data-visualizations...
Graph paper FWT :)
I don't like how the clickable area for images extends to the full width of the page even though the image itself does not.