Great post from Design Festival By Peter North ( 12th Mar 2012). Peter is a Director of Digital Marketing at an investment holdings company in Washington DC. He’s worked for nonprofits, startups and established enterprises, and he’s left a long trail of happy clients and effective websites.
A designer’s first inclination might be to make a pixel-perfect graph or chart within Photoshop or Illustrator, but that solution entails constantly updating the charts for even the smallest change in the data, which leaves the method well short of being easy and practical. If your metrics change by just a few units or percentage points, you’ll likely have to open the editable file, make the desired changes, export, and upload the static image every time. That’s a lot of work for such miniscule changes. Worse, if your data is based on timelines or other ever-changing metrics, then your charts are literally becoming outdated on a daily basis. And finally, static images are ultimately not interactive, which makes poor use of your programming knowledge and your website’s interactive capabilities.