I was reading an article on web typography and came across a great passage that sums up my problem with most of the character sheets I’ve seen:
The statistician and information designer Edward Tufte introduced the concept of data-ink in his 1983 classic, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. He defines data-ink as ‘the non-erasable core of the graphic’, whereas non-data-ink is the ink used in the graphic, not to directly represent data but for scales, labels, fills and edges. Tufte goes on to define the data-ink ratio as the proportion of ink that is used to present actual data compared to the total amount of ink used in the entire graphic. The goal is to design a graphic with the highest possible data-ink ratio (tending towards 1.0) without eliminating what is necessary for effective communication.
Enjoy.