Paris Hilton Birth Chart

The question is always: what is the nature of the data, and what is the story I am trying to tell? If I want to show the hierarchical structure of a company's budget, breaking down spending from large departments into smaller and smaller line items, a simple bar chart is useless. The illustrations are often not photographs but detailed, romantic botanical drawings that hearken back to an earlier, pre-industrial era. We are pattern-matching creatures. It was hidden in the architecture, in the server rooms, in the lines of code. A web designer, tasked with creating a new user interface, will often start with a wireframe—a skeletal, ghost template showing the placement of buttons, menus, and content blocks—before applying any color, typography, or branding. 1 It is within this complex landscape that a surprisingly simple tool has not only endured but has proven to be more relevant than ever: the printable chart.