Data labels
59 posts
I knew I had to remake this chart. The simple message of this chart is hidden behind layers of visual complexity. What the analyst wants readers to focus on (as discerned from the text on the right) is the red line, the seven-day moving average of new hospital admissions due to Covid-19 in Texas. My eyes kept wandering away from the line. It's the sideway data labels on the columns....
Joe N, a longtime reader, tweeted about the following chart, by the People's Policy Project: This is a simple column chart containing only two numbers, far exceeded by the count of labels and gridlines. I look at charts like the lady staring at these Ad Reinhardts: My artist friends say the black squares are not the same, if you look hard enough. Here is what I learned after one...
Like many others, some Floridians are questioning their state's Covid statistics. It's clear there are numerous "degrees of freedom" for politicians to manipulate the numbers. What's not clear is who's influencing these decisions. Are they public-health experts, donors, voters, or whom? A Twitter follower sent in the following chart, embedded in an informative article in Sun-Sentinel: I like the visual design. It's clean, and conveys a moderately complex concept effectively....
This Financial Times chart paints the picture of the emerging trend in Wimbledon men’s tennis: the average age of players has been rising, and hits 30 years old for the first time ever in 2019. The chart works brilliantly. Let's look at the design decisions that contributed to its success. The chart contains a good amount of data and the presentation is carefully layered, with the layers nicely tied to...
The editors of ASA's Amstat News certainly got my attention, in a recent article on school counselling. A research team asked two questions. The first was HOW ARE YOU FELINE? Stats and cats. The pun got my attention and presumably also made others stop and wonder. The second question was HOW DO YOU REMEMBER FEELING while you were taking a college statistics course? Well, it's hard to imagine the average...
Here is a typical business chart. A possible story here: institutional investors are generally buying AMD stock, except in Q3 2018. Let's give this chart a three-step treatment. STEP 1: The Basics Remove the data labels, which stand sideways awkwardly, and are redundant given the axis labels. If the audience includes people who want to take the underlying data, then supply a separate data table. It's easier to copy and...
Here is a typical business chart. A possible story here: institutional investors are generally buying AMD stock, except in Q3 2018. Let's give this chart a three-step treatment. STEP 1: The Basics Remove the data labels, which stand sideways awkwardly, and are redundant given the axis labels. If the audience includes people who want to take the underlying data, then supply a separate data table. It's easier to copy and...
The Wall Street Journal published a graphic showing the median pay levels at "most" public companies in the U.S. here. People who attended my dataviz seminar might recognize the similarity with the graphic showing internet download speeds by different broadband technologies. It's a clean, clear way of showing multiple comparisons on the same chart. You can see the distribution of pay levels of companies within each industry grouping, and the...
The Wall Street Journal published a graphic showing the median pay levels at "most" public companies in the U.S. here. People who attended my dataviz seminar might recognize the similarity with the graphic showing internet download speeds by different broadband technologies. It's a clean, clear way of showing multiple comparisons on the same chart. You can see the distribution of pay levels of companies within each industry grouping, and the...
Today we return to the basics. In a twitter exchange with Dean E., I found the following pie chart in an Atlantic article about who's buying San Francisco real estate: The pie chart is great at one thing, showing how workers in the software industry accounted for half of the real estate purchases. (Dean and I both want to see more details of the analysis as we have many questions...