Being able to generate (apparently) random numbers is an essential requirement for many areas of math, statistics, the sciences, technology and gaming. For instance, they can be used to assign participants...

Suppose you want to draw something on your web page using browser-native technologies. It might be some kind of animated scene, it might be a technical diagram, it could be some kind of custom infographic...

If you're a data communicator, having a good understanding of chart and table design is important. Thankfully, the art and science of creating effective charts and tables is the subject of a great number...

Introduction This is the second in a series on how new JavaScript features, introduced in the ECMAScript 2015 standard (aka ES6), allow for simpler solutions to some old JavaScript problems. In part...

This is Part 2 (in a series of 2) on why color is a complex and confusing topic. In Part 1 I looked at cases where colors might not be interpreted as expected. Here I'll cover the difficulties of picking...

In all the articles I've written here I've covered a fairly broad range of topics related to data visualization: the use of tick marks and labels , data density , the problems with dual-axis charts and...

Introduction I love JavaScript but I'm also well aware that, as a programming language, it's far from perfect. Two excellent books, Douglas Crockford's JavaScript : The Good Parts and David Herman's...

I've previously noted that I think stacked area charts are frequently used when a conventional line chart would be a better option. Here is the (fictional) example I used previously and the conventional...

Numbers without context are of very limited use. So it's a good thing that articles in newspapers and reports in the wider world will often compare the figures they relay to the (mean) average. But invariably...

As mentioned previously , we have a new JavaScript standard commonly known as ECMAScript 6 (ES6). I've spent quite a bit of time recently reading around the new features outlined in the standard that...