Gallery of terrible plots


Over the years students (and others) haven sent me plots to better understand various data. Often this is very useful. However, sometimes this goes very wrong, to the point where the plots do not help in understanding the data at all. Below is a gallery of such terrible plots.

The plot below has no axis labels, but what is much worse is that it essentially shows nothing at all about the data. It's just one blue blob...


The next two plots below have good axis labels, but they show all three lines on top of each other, so that one cannot tell which one is bigger, even though they are not all the same. I.e. it tells us almost nothing about how the three data sets differ. Judicious zooming might have helped.


This plot shows two lines that are very small until about t=2500. In order to see this better log-scale should have been used on the y-axis, with possibly plotting absolute values to avoid logs of negative numbers.