Charts

Chart types

Will Traditional Charts Survive?

No, traditional charts are useless  in our complex world

playfair-piechartOver the next 25 years, we will need new visualization tools to replace traditional charts.

As you know, line, bar and even pie charts first appeared 200 years ago, with William Playfair, and perhaps until 25 years ago, they were good enough helping us to make sense of our data. Before computers, they were crafted by graphic designers. Kids in schools drew them using millimetric paper.

Lotus 123 and Harvard Graphics were the most popular charting tools in the early days of personal computers. With those tools (and later, with Excel), the charting landscape changed forever. Some charts vanished, either because they weren’t simple enough and/or didn’t make it into the chart gallery (I miss trilinear plots – yes, Jon, I know how to create them in Excel, but still…), while others should never have been allowed into that gallery.

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Hans Rosling

Hans Rosling was here in Lisbon today, for one of his remarkable presentations. It seems that almost no one in the room new about his TED talks and, of course, everyone loved his charts. He gave his presentation in Portuguese, so some extra points there too… If you just return to planet Earth and don’t … Read more

How to Make Better Pie Charts with On-Demand Details

This article goes much against conventional wisdom about pie charts (and doughnut charts) by answering these two simple questions: Can we use a large number of categories in pie charts? (Yes, we can.) Can we make a productive use of the apparently useless doughnut chart? (Yes, we can.) Disclaimer (Sort of…) Let me start by … Read more

Pie Charts – A Devil’s Advocate Point of View

In what seems to be a post-vacation syndrome, I am in the mood for pie charts. I see them everywhere, even in car logos. Actually, I am more in the mood to defy current “crowd wisdom” about pie chats. Search the web for “pie chart” and you’ll get more than one million results, and a … Read more

The Best Pie Charts Come From Germany

Best Pie Chart Award (clean and balanced. Your perception may not be great at comparing angles, but who cares?)   2th Place (also nice, but too many slices, and I don’t like the title around the pie)   Lateral Pie-Thinking Award (well, perhaps someone just messed up the template)   Designer’s Pie Charts Award (data? … Read more

Charting around the clock

I’m a consensus kind of guy, I can’t help it. I always try to find the best parts of not-so-good things (a Curate’s egg syndrome?). Let me give you an example. One of the reasons why people like pie charts is because of its strong and familiar metaphor – it is part of our daily … Read more

Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003

Source: U.S. Census Bureau (original Excel file). The abortion ratio is defined by the number of abortions per 1,000 abortions and live births. (Click to enlarge) Notes: 1. We know that information visualization is all about pattern detection. But often our design choices hide relevant patterns behind the obvious one(s). Take this panel, for instance. … Read more

Chart redesign: California majority party by county

Nathan asks us Can You Improve this Mediocre Statistical Graphic? Since there are only two series (two parties) with a obvious mirror effect, I would say it doesn’t make sense (from a chart economy point of view) to display both series. And since the 50% mark is relevant in election results, why shouldn’t we just … Read more