[OliverJones]

With respect, this author misunderstands Edward Tufte's use of the term "Chart junk." Chart junk isn't just pointless decoration on charts. It's also misleading or missing scales, deceptive or inept ways of representing data, and so forth.

[kristjansson]

Of course Tufte's body of work a whole, and VDQI in particular address those issues, but chartjunk is, in my reading, a specific and limited complaint. His leading two examples are unintended moiré effect in cross hatching unnecessary grid lines. His third (the duck) is a bit more nebulous, but I read it as any sort of overly cute “we can so we did” effect on a visualization.

The mortal sins of data visualization misrepresent the data; the venal sin of chartjunk distracts from the data.