>Tufte dismisses these types of patterns as "chartjunk" and "unintentional optical art"

What Tufte doesn't understand is that your end goal isn't always information density and great insight.

Sometimes aesthetics can be equally or more important than the data.

Especially if the data are crap, like 90% of charts used in marketing (), where the marketing part is more important that actually showing something with the chart.

() Personal observation, YMMV.