A chart passes through five transformations before it reaches the reader. Most of the lying happens in layers two and three.
What you're looking at
Five horizontal strata, each representing a transformation stage between raw measurement and human comprehension. Arrows descend through the stack — information flows downward, and at each boundary something is lost or added. Two layers are marked in red: the statistical transform and the visual encoding, where the majority of distortion enters the pipeline.
Why I drew it this way
The stack metaphor is deliberate: each layer rests on the one above it, and you cannot skip a layer. A reader encountering the final chart has no direct access to layer one; they see only what survives the descent. I considered a branching tree to show alternative paths at each decision point, but that would suggest all paths are equally valid. They are not. Most branches lead to chartjunk or outright deception. The vertical stack makes the irreversibility clear: once you aggregate data in layer two, the granularity is gone. Once you choose a logarithmic scale in layer three, the visual weights are set.
What it argues
The diagram argues that most visual lying is structural, not decorative. Chartjunk lives in layer four — gratuitous gridlines, 3D bevels, clip art. But the real damage happens earlier: in the choice to smooth a time series until the variance disappears, or to break the y-axis so a 2% change looks like a cliff. Those decisions are invisible to the reader. The chart arrives at layer five already compromised, and no amount of minimalist design in layer four can repair it.
What I left out
I left out any feedback arrows — any path from perception back to encoding or data collection. In practice, good visualization is iterative: you draw, you notice what the data actually says, you go back and adjust the transform. But showing that loop would obscure the central point, which is about what the reader sees, not what the designer does. The reader's experience is unidirectional. They get the final artifact, and they have to trust that the four layers above it were handled honestly.