It is important that the message or data shines through your visual display. It should therefore be the most prominent and legible item in your display (Kirk 2012). Reducing clutter can help to achieve this.

Remove citations, caveats, logos, background shading, borders, and other nonrelevant data or graphic elements within the table or figure, where possible.

Reduce ‘ink on the page’ and pay attention to the data:ink ratio (Tufte 2001). This means:

• reducing the nondata ink by using paler tints or finer lines for nondata elements, such as grid lines, arrows, borders and shading
• increasing the data ink by making key points bold, highlighted, coloured, underlined and so on (Few 2012).