Surfboard Volume Chart

There is often very little text—perhaps just the product name and the price. Digital applications excel at tasks requiring collaboration, automated reminders, and the management of vast amounts of information, such as shared calendars or complex project management software. The box plot, for instance, is a marvel of informational efficiency, a simple graphic that summarizes a dataset's distribution, showing its median, quartiles, and outliers, allowing for quick comparison across many different groups. It stands as a powerful counterpoint to the idea that all things must become purely digital applications. For showing how the composition of a whole has changed over time—for example, the market share of different music formats from vinyl to streaming—a standard stacked bar chart can work, but a streamgraph, with its flowing, organic shapes, can often tell the story in a more beautiful and compelling way. It is a network of intersecting horizontal and vertical lines that governs the placement and alignment of every single element, from a headline to a photograph to the tiniest caption.