Xkcd style graphs
This question reminds me of the work Microsoft Research developed to automatically create 'hand drawn' maps for Bing. The process relies on four steps: data selection, data simplication, layout and decoration. The tool seems to be offline now, but when I tried it, it worked well for simple direction sets, but like the charts problem, it sometimes needed human curation to ensure that the selection and simplification steps were meaningful.<p>Details: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/destinationmaps-012510.aspx" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/news/features/destinatio...</a><p>Example: <a href="http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/destination_maps/results/html/map_007.html" rel="nofollow">http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/kopf/destinati...</a>