I’ve been building data visualizations for web for almost ten years. Most of the time it was some kind of dashboard with custom charts, interactivity and of course brand look.

Grammar of graphics always was this North Star for me. It is very helpful to go through papers and books and search for inspiration how to organize your system. But direct implementations are finicky to work with. And in my hubris I attempted to write yet another one implementation of grammar of graphics and it resulted in exactly the same problems! With complex marks it is ambiguous what is a data point and what is a series. Tuning looks require this configuration objects scattered around chart definition and composition sometimes require to inject something in two different parts of definition.

Now I treat grammar of graphics as this collection of patterns and good practices. But surrender to pragmatic solutions when necessary.

Anyway I think I owe big part of my career to works of Wickham and Wilkinson.