tufte-vdqi

tufte-vdqi

Give your AI agents the skill of visualizing data the way Edward Tufte intended.

Based on Edward Tufte's The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

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Every chart your agent produces gets scored against Tufte's principles — lie factor measured, chartjunk stripped, redundant ink removed, labels moved inline, axes replaced with range-frames, monetary values inflation-adjusted, and the result rendered as a clean SVG. Not as a suggestion. As a workflow.

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Before / After

Before	After

Same data, both times. No decorative bars, no arbitrary colors. Cleveland dot plots that let the actual signal — and the uncertainty — speak for itself.

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Install

The two skills follow the open SKILL.md agent-skills standard, so they work in any harness that reads it. Each skill directory is self-contained (scripts, reference, assets included) and can be installed on its own.

Claude Code — from your terminal

claude plugin marketplace add gnurio/tufte-vdqi-plugin
claude plugin install tufte-vdqi@tufte-vdqi-marketplace

Claude Code — inside a session (typed at the > prompt, not the shell)

/plugin marketplace add gnurio/tufte-vdqi-plugin
/plugin install tufte-vdqi

Claude Desktop / Cowork

1. Open Claude Desktop → Cowork tab → Plugins
2. Add this repo as a plugin source (or upload it as a ZIP)

Requires a paid Claude plan with Cowork enabled. Org admins: Organization Settings → Plugins → GitHub source → paste this repo URL.

Codex CLI

git clone https://github.com/gnurio/tufte-vdqi-plugin
cp -r tufte-vdqi-plugin/skills/* ~/.codex/skills/

OpenCode

git clone https://github.com/gnurio/tufte-vdqi-plugin
cp -r tufte-vdqi-plugin/skills/* ~/.config/opencode/skills/

Any other SKILL.md-compatible agent (Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, …)

Copy the directories under skills/ into wherever your tool discovers skills. Scripts need only Python 3 — no dependencies.

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Skills

Two skills, one VDQI-sourced reference. The principles file (mirrored into both skills so each installs standalone) is the source-grounded encoding of Tufte's specific techniques — a nine-criterion rubric with numeric anchors, ten chart genres with construction recipes, a chartjunk taxonomy, 13+14 named anti-pattern/exemplar catalogues, and the friendly-graphic checklist — all cited to VDQI by page.

Skill	What it does
tufte-critique	Scores a graphic against a nine-criterion VDQI rubric with numeric anchors, names the chartjunk species present (moiré, dreaded grid, duck, decoration), computes lie factor and compares to VDQI's catalogue (14.8 NYT MPG, 59.4 TIME barrel "a record", etc.), checks whether the data wants a different genre (table for ≤20 numbers, small multiples for many series, range frame instead of bordered scatter), and emits fixes tagged with remedy / genre / anti-pattern resemblance / exemplar to emulate.
tufte-chart	Produces an actual SVG using Tufte's specific genres. Ships per-genre scripts for time-series, small multiples, the quartile plot (Tufte's stripped-down box plot), and range-frame scatter (with optional dot-dash marginals), plus an HTML wrapper using the bundled tufte-css.

Ships with helper scripts and the tufte-css typography bundle (MIT, vendored under skills/tufte-chart/assets/tufte-css/):