tufte-vdqi

Chartwright

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

---

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.

---

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.

---

Install

Individual (Claude Code)

1. Open Claude Desktop → switch to the Cowork tab
2. Go to Plugins
3. Add this repo as a plugin source
4. Upload the ZIP file

Organization (admin)

1. Go to Organization Settings → Plugins
2. Select GitHub as the source
3. Paste this repo URL
4. Set market preference: Required / Available / Default

Requires a paid Claude plan (Pro, Max, Team, or Enterprise) with Cowork enabled.

---

Skills

Three skills, one VDQI-sourced reference. The router picks between the two action skills; the principles file (mirrored into both skills) is the source-grounded encoding of Tufte's specific techniques — nine criteria with numeric anchors, ten chart genres with construction recipes, a chartjunk taxonomy, and 13+14 named anti-pattern/exemplar catalogues — all cited to VDQI by page.

Skill	What it does
orchestrate-tufte-vdqi	Routes a request to assess, render, or both. Use it when you're unsure where to start.
assess-graphical-excellence	Scores a graphic against Tufte's nine criteria with VDQI 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.
render-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/render-tufte-chart/assets/tufte-css/):

• assess-graphical-excellence/scripts/deflate.py — inflation adjustment for monetary time series. Requires real CPI values; errors on a missing year rather than guessing.
• render-tufte-chart/scripts/render_line_svg.py — Tufte-style time-series line chart (VDQI C10).
• render-tufte-chart/scripts/small_multiples.py — grid of identical mini-charts sharing one scale (VDQI C5).
• render-tufte-chart/scripts/quartile_plot.py — Tufte's stripped-down box plot (VDQI C1, pp.124–125).
• render-tufte-chart/scripts/range_frame.py — scatterplot with axis lines spanning only the data range (VDQI C2, pp.130–132); pass --marginal-dash for the dot-dash plot (C3, p.133).
• render-tufte-chart/scripts/wrap_html.py — wraps any SVG in a Tufte-styled HTML page using the vendored ET Book typography; copies the stylesheet and fonts next to the output so it opens in any browser with no network.

---

Usage

Start with the orchestrator — it detects your intent and routes you:

/orchestrate-tufte-vdqi

Or invoke an action skill directly:

/assess-graphical-excellence
/render-tufte-chart

---

Common workflows

"Is this chart any good?"

assess-graphical-excellence   → nine-criteria scores, lie factor, prioritised fixes (B1–B7)