tufte-data-viz

tufte-data-viz is Caylent's Agent Skill for charts. Whenever your agent creates, reviews or styles a chart, graph, dashboard or sparkline, it applies Edward Tufte's data visualization principles and modern screen-first standards, so the chart comes out clean, honest and readable without extra prompting. Caylent calls it opinionated by design: it removes gridlines, swaps legends for direct labels, rejects pie charts and prefers serif type. What it teaches your agent - Start from the message: the key finding, its comparison context and the chart type that fits the data - Maximize the data-ink ratio: drop gridlines, borders, decoration and legends that don't carry data - Use direct labels and range-frame axes, with no 3D, no dual y-axes and no pie charts unless you insist - Keep gray as the main color and highlight selectively, on off-white backgrounds with serif type - Annotate what matters, write titles that state the finding, and format numbers for people ($1.2M) - Follow screen-first rules: progressive disclosure, WCAG contrast and dual encoding, responsive layouts, purposeful animation that respects reduced motion, and a dark mode designed rather than inverted - Reach for small multiples, sparklines, slopegraphs and well-ruled tables, or a sentence when a chart isn't needed - Check every chart against its validation checklist before showing it Libraries it covers - Recharts, ECharts, Chart.js, matplotlib, Plotly, and D3.js, SVG and HTML, each with its own rule file and examples Good to know - Add it with npx skills add caylent/tufte-data-viz. It's an Agent Skill that only reads its own rule files. - Every rule is a default: tell your agent when you want something different and it deviates. - It covers charts, not slide design. - Based on Tufte's four books. Made by Caylent, not by Edward Tufte. MIT licensed.

• “Chart monthly revenue against target in Recharts”

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• “Review this matplotlib chart and fix what Tufte would object to”

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• “Turn these five KPIs into sparklines with min and max markers”

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• “Show revenue by region as small multiples on a shared scale”

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• “Make this ECharts dashboard accessible and readable in dark mode”

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• “Compare team sizes in 2024 and 2025 as a slopegraph”

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