Defining Chart Clutter

For most people that work in data, they will have come across the term chart clutter or chart junk. These are elements included in a visualisation that distract, rather than educate. They could be repeated data labels, grid lines that aren’t needed or plot borders that add little to understanding. Too many of these elements increase cognitive load on the intended audience and make things harder to understand and less pleasurable to read.

Defining chart clutter is important as you want to remove distractions that, well, distract your audience...but you don’t want to remove elements that help your reader understand how to interpret your visualisation.

To help, here is a definition from the book ‘Storytelling with Data’ that I think sums it up clearly and is a question you can ask again and again when deciding what to include or remove:

“Chart Clutter are visual elements that take up space but don’t increase understanding”