Bella consults

He wrote about the Wall Street Journal. The European issue. And the facelift from 2009–11–17. Ha. He should have taken a look at the issue from 2009–11–13:

Source: Wall Street Journal Europe, 2009–11–13, p. 26.

You have to add up the overlaps to get the point. The colors are no better. You have to learn: Samsung is always on top. But has changing colors. The same as the competitor. But that is patterned. The competitors’ bars are pale at the end. Anyway, you have to add that. Ok, than I just read the numbers. Now my eyes go left-right, left-right, left-right, left-right.
The designer deserves the same. Once left, once right. Vigorously.

Once more didactic. Again the graphic from the newspaper Handelsblatt:

Source: Handelsblatt, 2009–04–30, No. 83, p. 1, original copy this time.
Trucks (Straßengüterverkehr), trains (Eisenbahnen), ships (Binnenschifffahrt).

You think: Truck is faster growing than train. Train is only growing little. Ships hardly at all. But that’s not true. You can’t compare developments for values on different levels. Logarithmical helps.

Now you see: Rail is growing faster than truck. 70 percent to 56 percent. Ship even dropped in between. All in all it grew 3 percent.

Logarithmic doesn’t always work. But more often.

Today it’s getting didactic. I did some cutting.

Source: Handelsblatt, April 30th 2009, no. 83, p. 1, redesign by me. Click for original. Graphic displays increase of highway transportation in billions of ton-kilometers (1997 to 2008).

Many will say: left is correctly scaled. They believe: Null value must be shown. Regardless of line or column – never cut.

But: The null value is not sea level. On the right the full space is utilized to display changes. That’s important, often. All other scales more or less steepen the slope. They show more or less details. That the variation is bigger than 50 %: neither visible on the right nor the left. Better write that down.

Anyway: To cut lines’ feet is not forbidden. Snip snap.

PowerPoint is in discussion. It works well as a slide projector. Then they can all see what they are supposed to see. Not good if they see what they are supposed to hear: Slides look like notes for somebody’s speech. Like this:

If slides look like this: trash them.

Many just read off their notes. More slowly than people could read themselves. Because reading is faster than hearing. You pray for the next slide. Which ideally is the last one.

Notes are for the pocket. Only in case of need you pull them out. Never show them to anybody. And for sure: Don´t show them to everybody. Slides which look like notes: trash them.

Instead: make eyes like that.

6 reasons for vacation. 2 years. 2 parts of Germany. 24 values. Sounds easy. It’s not. A lot to think about in this chart.

Source: Welt am Sonntag (WAMS), No. 43, 2009–10–25, p.24
Motivations of Germans for vacation, East (”Ost”) vs. West Germany, from top: new impressions, experience, being on travel, to indulge in something, relaxation, reactivation of memories.

Closeness connects: The headline connects with all first bars. It becomes graphical itself. But shouldn’t. It’s for all four bars.

Time is horizontal: We had that before. Here, a decrease is a movement to the left. Hard to understand for the eye.

Man with a hat: Two men stand beside each other. The smaller one wears a hat. How small is that one? Values to the right of the bar: better not this time.

Colours group: In WAMS all values for 1991 and all values for 2008. Might be ok. Not ideal here.

Checkered is out: Stripes in the background are funny. And decrease readability.

Most important: reason, years, change between years, part of Germany and variance between East and West – all packed into the vertical. Too much.

Source: DeltaMaster

My rule: Use two visual axes: vertical and horizontal, if it helps. Doesn’t always work. Here it’s ok.

Time only runs top down in sandglasses. But not in charts. There, time is from left to right. Because it’s like that. Take a chart with a horizontal x-axis and a vertical y-axis. The independent variable should always be on the x-axis. Then everybody knows: The dependent variable is on the y-axis. That’s helpful. Like most other conventions, too.

In the newspaper WAMS, the time is vertical. Not too bad. But also not very nice.

Source: Welt am Sonntag, Nr. 40, 04/10/2009, p. 36. Title: 26 percent minus. The German export to the Iran in billions of Euro, January to July for each year

Oh, ZEIT. I didn´t mean that. My scribbled design was born out of necessity. Yours is intentional.

Scribbling threefold from Die ZEIT. Not supposed to take it seriously?
Source: DIE ZEIT No. 19 from 2009–04–30, No. 20 from 2009–05–07, No. 25 from 2009–06–10.

Funny: We use a computer to make it look handmade. Even the handwriting is a computer font.

Handwriting and painting signal: Love letter. Poetry album. Children’s book. First-grader. Shopping list. Draft. Sketch. Holiday greetings. Note. So rather: Temporary. Hasty. Unfinished. Casual. Raw. Imprecise. Maybe faulty. Unchecked. Unique. Spontaneous. And young.

All want young. I don’t care. Data neither.

We are on vacation in France. In France they play Boule. With the neighbor’s dog I bet on the outcome. I watched five throws from each of them and measured.

I heeded his advice. And sketched the entire distribution. Not only the mean values. This is how close the boules landed to the Cochon. In centimeter.

With the naked eye I can see now:

Outlier
He made the very best throw of all. One swallow? A summer?

Happy made some respectable throws. But also the worst one. Could be a one-time outlier. Or a hint that his performance is not solid.

Averages
Hannes and Bimpfi are close to each other. So are he and Baui. Hm. That’s still not what I was looking for.

Spread
Bauis throws spread less than his do. And the averages differ only by 1 centimeter. Therefore Baui comes in third place, instead of fourth.

Bimpfi’s performance is solid, with a moderate spread. Hannes beats them all: His average and spread are the lowest.

I bet on Hannes. He won.

He says: If you have the data, show them. Instead of whining about “crash” and “upswing” and “slump” and “boom”. Otherwise, someone believes it is 70 % and someone else believes something else. So, the controllers may not copycat the newspapers. He says, they don’t have to: They have their data.

Matt says the same. Roughly. He has shown us a graphic. Sherman Kent drew it. 40 years ago. A secret agent from America. NATO officers were to estimate how much percent Sherman means when he says: something is “highly likely” or “probably” or “unlikely” or “highly unlikely” and so on.

Source: Richards J. Heuer, Jr.: Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Langley 1999, p. 155.

Ah. Quite dangerous. After all, this was about military stuff. If the CIA tells the President, the bad guys are coming “probably”. And the President understands, ok, well, maybe with a probability of 25 %. But the CIA had 75 % in mind: Phew.

Sherman said, that´s why there have to be standards for words in the reports of intelligence agencies:

Maybe. Anyway: Rules are good. Whining is bad.

Tax revenues collapse. Tells us the Handelsblatt. He thinks, 9 percent minus and collapse don’t go together. I read the article, too. And nearly collapsed: Perceptive priority not understood. Once again: With columns you interpret differences in length as differences in value. Therefore: Chopping prohibited. Or: Use lines instead of columns.

The Handelsblatt didn’t. See left. But they should. See right.

“Beyond the zenith”: German tax revenues in billion Euro. Source: Handelsblatt no. 131, July 13th 2009, p. 3. Redesign: me. – The Handelsblatt is a major German economy newspaper.

Now I became a little skeptical and checked the reference (PDF). There are two more estimates. Hm.

Source: me.

Now I’m pinned to the office wall. I like that. My own small multiple.

Apropos of resolution: General Electric has got a web page with health data. You can play with the data. 300 stickmen symbolize America. They are in every picture.

Depending on “Diseases & Conditions” and “Risk Factors” they stand in different formations. Well, sometimes they just disappear. Here 120 stickmen have left (or 40%).

For a stroke it looks like this. The thin ones on the left and the fat ones on the right.

Maximum differentiation is 0.33 % (1/300) if 300 stickmen symbolize America as a whole. Within the segments differentiation drops. For the thin ones it is 4.8 % (1/21). But now listen: 1 % of the thin ones have a stroke. That’s one-fifth stickman (1 % of 21). But GE doesn’t paint this. Underneath the picture: The more fat, the more stroke. I can’t see that either. Everything is 2 %. Except the thin ones (1%).

Play with it yourself. I believe: Painting absolute frequencies while talking about percentages goes wrong.

I don’t care about all that: I am a Labrador. I wouldn’t mind being fat.

I’m in France. The water bill has a chart. The chart is all right. Consumption is displayed compared to the years before. The EU wants it that way since May 2008 (Directive 2006/32/EG, PDF). Already in 2006 the EU said: The energy companies have to bill in an “informative way”. The real prices have to be displayed. And the real energy consumption. Also “Comparisons of the final customer’s current energy consumption with consumption for the same period in the previous year, preferably in graphic form” are needed.

Source: mine

So what’s the conclusion for a European dog?

1. If you like your customers you give them the possibility to compare by themselves. Before the EU tells you to do so. Customers like that. Even when they recognize that they have consumed more.
2. In times of crisis the government feels strong. It will dictate many regulations: who shows whom what to do and how to do it. I still don’t believe the state is a better manager. Nor that the state is a good graphic designer. So, a smart dog takes matters into her own hands.

One of my rules: Graphs must be good to read. Good means fast and clear. That applies to all measuring instruments. For watches, too.

Classical watches are beautiful because they are mechanical. They show all values with analog scales. Not good for readability. But nothing else worked. So far. This watch breaks the rules. The stop function looks digital but works with a mechanic drive. That’s new and difficult to produce. Grand complication. You need 800 individual parts and 4 barrels to build it.

The Porsche Design INDICATOR (P’6910) with a mechanical digital stop function display –
click for movie

The stop function is much better readable. Better than with individual indicators for hours, minutes, seconds and tenths of seconds. I see: ANALOG WAS NOT THE CONSEQUENCE OF MISSING READABILITY BUT A CONSEQUENCE OF THE MECHANICS.

However, I like clocks with analog indicators. But not in controlling. There, indicators remain old and stupid.

Apropos competent with media. Leo from the Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ) got width, height and position. But that doesn’t mean anything. The 100 % value can be at the top middle, bottom middle or in the middle right. No meaning.

Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2009–04–29, p. 31. The red dots are labeled with the names of the most important shareholdings of BayernLB (Bank of the state of Bavaria) and with the percentage held by BayernLB. The article suspects that some of them may be sold. Click to enlarge.

Same issue: The annual average temperature is rising, I thought. Not the temperature is rising but each year. Not cold at the bottom but 1901. At the top it’s pretty warm but above all 2008. The temperature is next to the year. But no clue what it was like in other years. This chart stinks.

Source: Süddeutsche Zeitung, 2009–04–29, p. 6. On the vertical scale: the 10 warmest years in Germany since 1901, the long-time average is 8.2 degree Celsius. Click to enlarge.

That makes me sad. The journalists of the Süddeutsche Zeitung do a good job. But who believes in good research with such bad drawings?

Frustrated, I turned to watch television. No help either. The TV guide, “TV Today”, was from last week. The charts were as bad as in Süddeutsche Zeitung. But not even worse. Oh my goodness.

Source: TV Today, 2009–04–11, p. 4. TV consumption in 2007 and 2008 in minutes on easter holidays (green) and average for the whole year (red).