In the Beginning

Upon reading Stephen Few's books on business data presentation and Information Dashboard Design it was clear that Bullet Graphs are tremendously useful and effective for presenting data in an evaluative context, and are (or should be) a primary tool in every dashboard designer's box.

Sadly, the leading BI platforms, packages, and technologies spent their time, energy, resources and attention on adding more and more eye candy and super-duper "NEW" "BRIGHTER" "SEXY" stuff to their offerings instead of incorporating the best principles and practices of high quality analytic information design.

So I was left on my own to create Bullet Graphs. The Bullet Grapherator began as a buch of noodling around with various drawing tools creating Bullet Graphs. After a bit of experimentation I settled on Inkscape and SVG as the most effective (and cheapest at $0) way to get the Bullet Graphs I was after.

It became clear that creating Bullet Graphs by hand was impractical, so I began to fiddle with a number of approaches to automating the process, and the Bullet Grapherator took such shape as it has. It's not perfect, or even very good, but it's started and I hope that one day it'll grow up into a valuable tool. If nothing else, the process has taught me a lot about the nature of Bullet Graphs, their essential characteristics, subtleties, edge cases where design tweaks need to be accommodated, and so on.