I’ve seen the following scenario play out many times in the organizations with which I work:

A chart creator decides to “get creative” by using a histogram, connected scatterplot, ribbon chart or some other chart type that they know to be unfamiliar to the audience. They could have used a simpler, more familiar chart type to say the same things about the data, but they wanted to “challenge the audience,” or “teach them new chart-reading skills.”

The chart then goes over like a lead balloon, however. The audience misreads the chart, skips reading it altogether, or gets annoyed with the chart creator, who then feels bitter, believing their audience to be intellectually lazy or just dumb.