This isn't a great example, because they're effectively using a chart to show a handful of data points. The key with the data/ink ratio is to densify the amount of data shown so that the ink that is used can show additional dimensions or statistics -- such as using a 2 dimensional plot, turning the axes into box plot equivalents, or other relationships.

That page is a lot of ink for very little data. It's also somewhat wrong - no, you can't claim the axis marks and labels aren't data ink at all just because it doesn't directly reflect the measure. They are still data that's extremely relevant to reading the chart. Yes, even if Tufte says otherwise.

Meanwhile, even Tufte's advice was explicitly to grey them down, but not completely remove them.

(And we can debate Tufte's advice - lots of other comments on this page how he had great aesthetic sensibility, but his advice wasn't grounded in reason or actual readability research, and so is limited to the examples he chose)

To be fair, if someone wanted to present that exact dataset efficiently, they would have probably proposed something much different, like an horizontal chart with thin lines, eg

North [------------] 7

South [--------] 5

East [--------] 5

West [-----] 3

or something, which would have saved a lot of data/ink ratio

That’s interesting. However, with charts, reducing the amount of ink can sometimes compromise readability.

It makes me think of https://xkcd.com/688/

I think I prefer the 10-12% range myself.

I remember getting Tufte's book ("The Visual Display of Quantitative Information") and being really excited because I'd heard all these great things about it, and then being disappointed because it had no real justification for its claims. The "data ink" thing is a typical example. I'm willing to accept the general concept that many graphs are too cluttered. But there's no particular reason to suppose that quantifying the proportion of "data ink" and trying to optimize it is the best way to handle that. A lot of the book is just taking subjective aesthetic judgements and trying to frame them as some kind of objective truth.

If we really wanted reliable guidelines on how to format graphs, we would want to ground them in psychological research that actually demonstrates that, for instance, some versions result in better understanding or recall of certain information. But as far as I can see Tufte's book makes no attempt to do this. (Perhaps he or those who built on his works did it later on?)

Viewing in dark mode, so most of the ‘ink’ is used to render the empty background. Every suggested change here decreases the ink/data ratio.