On the other hand, IMO this looks exactly like an XKCD style graph while all the others (including the mathematica) seemed a little off to me.

I'd say, a little bit too much jitter, especially in text. Some of the versions for Mathematica, et al. were a little bit closer, IMO.

The text is just a matter of font. The rendering of the graphs look exactly like the original, and that's the hard part.

Edit: as pointed out below, the algorithm was lifted from another version done in Python/Matplotlib by Jake Vanderplas: http://jakevdp.github.com/blog/2012/10/07/xkcd-style-plots-i...

The edit window is now closed, but I realised that the font he uses is Humor Sans, which is based on Randal Munroe's handwriting (the author of XKCD).

http://xkcdsucks.blogspot.com/2009/03/xkcdsucks-is-proud-to-...

I'd agree that the font is too much - it's bordering on illegible for me in Chrome 22 on Win 7.

It is badly hinted and thus badly anti-aliased.

D3js is pretty verbose, but what you get is full control. Most charting libraries allow only a limited amount of configurability, which is neat if you just need to plot a basic chart quickly, but makes them awful if you want to make novel (or at least, more uncommon) kinds of visualisations or make non-standard changes to existing ones.

The best thing about this is that it doesn't require me to download and install 1.8 gigabytes of life-sucking Mathematica demo-version just to get a graph that I can draw on a napkin in 4 or 5 seconds ..

Mathematica has higher level drawing functions.

D3 tends to be more roll your own.