Visualizing Data Is An Art - We Should Treat It Like One
The mental model I've settled on for now is to think of data visualization as a combination of primitives, dimensions, and goals.
Primitives are the building blocks of a visualization. They're the shapes, colors, typography, encodings, interactions, and everything else that tangibly makes up a chart.
Dimensions are the different aspects of a visualization that we need to trade off against each other, like precision, aesthetics, and ethics.
Goals are the things we hope our audience can do with our visualizations, like communicating a specific insight, making it easy to spot trends in a dense dataset, or making the audience feel a certain emotion.
The general question of data visualization can then be framed as: how do I combine the right primitives in a way that will achieve my goal?
This article follows up on what they said in an interview I linked in on pie charts, with a lot more detail explaining their view that data visualization is an art, not a science