We are all surrounded by data and the easiest way to understand what it is trying to tell us is to draw a picture that helps summarise them in some way. Often, standard visual techniques (like histograms and bar charts) are used, and used well but sometimes they aren’t. With the advent of new technologies that are now widely accessible to industry and the general public, there have been many attempts at proposing new ways of visualising data. Some of them have been very helpful while others have been less than useful. In this talk I shall present an overview of good, bad, and plain ugly attempts to visualise data in the news and social media and explain what makes them so. There will be zero maths involved, but plenty of pretty (and not so pretty) pictures . . . in colour.