Since I usually cannot spend 50 hours on a chart, I wonder why it is so hard to make decent graphs with the usual Office packages. They make it easy to create something and for others to contribute, but have really bad defaults. Even when you make the effort to adjust, you can still tell the program. And templating does not really work either.

What do you use?

Love the article, this is why I browse HN.

50 hours to draw a line graph vs. a few minutes trying various styles in PowerPoint.

Stop letting machines make graphs, pay a draftsman like we used to do!

(I'm fairly dense though, so I probably completely missed that the author was instead simply espousing the joys of learning a new handicraft.)

(But the temperatures should have been recorded on the Réaumur scale.)

While not as authentic as a hand-drawn chart, I find Decker can produce HyperCard-like graphs nicely.