Mohammad Shaker

What I see and like

A stock chart with everything stripped away — no gridlines, no box, no drop shadow — just a thin line and two labeled endpoints. Nothing competes with the trend. The empty space is not wasted; it is the silence that lets one line be heard.

The ratio

Data-ink is the non-erasable core of a graphic: the ink that, if removed, would take information with it. Everything else is overhead.

                 data-ink (ink that encodes data)
   data-ink   =  --------------------------------
   ratio          total ink used to print graphic

   goal: -> 1.0   (within reason)

Erase, then erase again

Editing a graphic is mostly subtraction. Each pass removes ink that carried no data, then removes ink that repeated data already shown.

   PASS 0            PASS 1            PASS 2
   heavy             lighter           quiet
   +===========+     ___________       
   ‖ |||||||   ‖     |   . . .         . . .   bars -> dots
   ‖ |||||||   ‖     |  . . . .       . . . .  drop the frame
   ‖ |||||||   ‖     |_________       _______  drop the box
   +===========+     gridlines fade   only data remains

A worked subtraction

Take an ordinary bar chart and account for the ink:

Element	Carries data?	Verdict
Bar height	Yes	Keep
Heavy bar fill	Redundant with height	Lighten or remove
Chart border box	No	Erase
Background grid	Mostly no	Erase or mute
Drop shadow / 3D	No	Erase

Within reason

The phrase matters. A ratio pushed to extremes can hurt legibility — a few reference lines or labels are data-ink's helpful companions. Erase the noise, not the meaning.

Key takeaways

Data-ink is ink you cannot remove without losing information.
Design by subtraction: erase non-data-ink, then redundant data-ink.
"Within reason" — keep the scaffolding that genuinely aids reading.

Checklist

[ ] I removed every box, grid, and shadow that carried no data
[ ] No data is encoded twice in two kinds of ink
[ ] What remains is almost entirely the data itself