Some of these lines look too sinusoidal to me. I would want more randomness for the "hand drawn" look.
Agreed. A bit too much uniformity and not enough noise.
But you don't want to distort the message either. How do you know that you will not infer the wrong conclusion on another chart if you bend the curves, think of a chart showing two curves, one being slightly higher than the other.
How to tell when your comic has made a real cultural impact: 101.
Quite a nice look. It's interesting how Physics and geometry problems are often best indicated with rough hand-drawn diagrams. If you draw a freehand triangle with chalk on a board, you can't help but seeing it as an idealised triangle - an indication of some symbolic representation engine in the brain.
Does anyone else think there is a period to the borders? I looked for it to be more apparently unpatterned.
Yes, likely it's just sin()... Looks too regular to my eyes.
It just needs some random noise to be perfect!
I've drawn graphs by hand (using a pen-tablet), it's fun and looks nice. But then I realized I had a bug in the data. fuck!
If you use a pressure-sensitive vector drawing program, like Adobe Illustrator, you can go back in and edit your lines afterwards.
By no means to I want to sound like a party-pooper (truly, I love this stuff and plan to use it), but this feels like this is the "Comic Sans" of graphing. In an essence, we know better than to use it in a serious sense, but someone, somewhere might use it incorrectly, then suddenly, poof, everyone's XKCDing their graphs
Just like Comic Sans, I'm not really sure there is an appropriate use for XKCD style outside of the actual XKCD comic and similar-style comics. It's a cliche that has no functional purpose.
Why does everything need to have a functional purpose? Can't hacking be just for fun, playing around, and seeing what you can do?
The suggestion I've heard is that the xkcd style is a good way to signal "this is just an informal whiteboard sketch, not a highly-refined analysis". I think there's a place for that.
Let's be honest: the people who are indiscriminately xkcding their plots were never making good-looking plots in the first place.