What's been more interesting to me lately than using software to design data visualizations is learning to draw data by hand. It's a time consuming process but incredibly rewarding. The feeling of erasing graphite to reveal clean, crisp lines is something that software cannot recreate.

> A professional draftsman of the 1920's may cringe at the imperfections in my line graph above. They can suck it.

I am willing to suck it but the kerning is still killing me. (I love everything about this btw)

And here I thought drawing graphs in TikZ was doing it manually.

Love the article, this is why I browse HN.

They look really good. I really enjoy looking at midcentury engineering charts/diagrams and stuff like jeppesen charts. NASA has a lot of good ones. The way the text looks, the line economy, the general aesthetic. Well worth the effort imo!