Huntsville Alabama Times scoops New York Times: sports-data sparklines

Lyn McDaniel, design editor of the Huntsville Times, reports the use of sparklines in their sports section on March 21, 2005:

“Here is a modest first use of sparklines that appeared in The Huntsville Times March 21.

The graph lines seem fatter because of the process of making a pdf. In reality they are about half-point, and could have been far thinner. Even 85-line presses can reproduce a hairline easily; we have not tried to find the minimum printable thickness on our 110-line press.

They were created to the same scale with Adobe Illustrator’s graphing function and imported onto the page individually to give me some flexibility in placement. Actually making the charts took only a few minutes. Freehand has a similar graphing function.”