Bella consults

The eye cannot sort colors into a ranking. It only works with hues. That is why most colored graphs are hard to read. Hue needs a continuous measure (€, cm, km/h, etc.). Normally. An exception: in the German newspaper “Welt am Sonntag”.

Source: Welt am Sonntag, 2008–03–16, p. 6.

The strength of the new left-wing party in Germany is a discrete measure (Governing party, second most party, etc.). Still the idea of hues works. Great. Apart from that: beautiful Bavaria. The states to the right (”Sonntagsfrage Landtagswahl”, opinion poll for state elections) should be sorted. According to the share of the left-wing party.

Appetite always signals which piece of the pie is biggest. Always? Sort the pieces. How long did it take?

Sort the bars. How long did it take? Values are the same in both cases.

Eric has the same example. But while scaling the bars he was tricked by Excel.

Guess what the circular area represents. And?

Its even worse in Excel. You can use the diameter to show the value.

It’s enough to drive a person mad.

His day was ruined already. His beloved SportAuto newspaper had graphically demolished 500 yards of safety fence. I wanted to comfort him and skimmed through the paper. Issue seven 2006. Insiders know. Ooh…

Page 102 in the same issue: Formula One lap times from two seasons. Smaller engines yet faster again. Very interesting comparison. Good data. Good legend. Beautiful Evidence.

But the chart: a total loss. Reason: Gross negligence. On the right side: That’s how it should have looked like. The two Grand Prix which are not comparable (rain in Australia, new race track in Imola) are left out. During the race they have been faster twice and slower three times. Just the opposite for the training.

In the last two issues of SportAuto: not one chart at all. Good.

The German Newspaper “Die Süddeutsche” uses graphic tables in its online edition. They show positive and negative deviations. In the same direction. Here, they always quarrel about that. Pro: It’s easy to compare absolute values. It saves space. Contra: You have to learn it first. And you need color.

Stripes are a la mode. No, no, no – forbidden! They emphasize where there is nothing to emphasize. Get rid of them. Lean is beautiful. This goes for bars, too. Just 9 pixels high instead of 14. The idea of graphs in tables is that of wordlike graphics. Graphs as large as a word. Bars don’t need to be larger than the text around them.

Know what: Sparklines are missing, too. They are the archetype of wordlike graphics. Read their pattern (“SAP came back from a deep fall and now drifts sideways”) or segment by segment (“VW dropped, went sideways, climbed steep, dropped very fast, climbed very steep, dropped again, climbed ever steeper…”). They offer information otherwise unavailable. To be precise: the table had 20 values, now has 440 values. Information density has increased by a factor of 22.

P.S. The sparklines show values from 2007–12–28 to 2008–02–28. You might dispute scaling, e.g. here.

In real life, the bad always win. That’s why we have the movies. In movies it’s the good who win. So in mine. The graceful heroine defeats the mean chart junkie. After severe struggle. Nerve-wracking. Many special effects. A true blog buster.

To start the film, click on the image. To restart, please reload this page.

Thanks Emil! Not too bad a graphic. Color is used as an attribute of the object in question. Better done than this one.

Varnish reflects. Steel sheets are bended. Unnecessary. White for “overall” is not the same as for “luxury”.

I don’t like the sorting. Descending per class. You see what is important per class. But I am more interested in differences between classes. Compare the overall statistics to the different segments.

White is trendy. How does it establish itself? I put it first in my version. And I only sort once. For overall. Sorting is constant for all classes.

But one might argue about that.

I have to curse the Financial Times once more. That is how you need to show stock quotes:

Here: even more stock quotes with sparklines. And up-to date. Mostly.

Or is anyone interested in the “news” that the last day was up while twenty days before that where down?

I have cancelled all my daily newspapers.

Stock markets are so exciting for the Financial Times Deutschland. Either its all bullish or altogether bearish. Every day anew. Nothing for investors with cardiac insufficiency who happen to miss their glasses.

This is the same level as for the regional newspaper Nürnberger Nachrichten. They have two angles only, too.

For sensitive souls like me an arrow signals a trend. The steeper the more. A trend is easy to calculate and visualize:

* nt = “no trend”

Business charts are losers. Its only good luck if they work at all. He has shown some basic problems of them. With mine here, you need more brains than luck to find the truth.

Each series increases with the same amount per month. The first increases by 5, the second by 25 and the third by 30. All increase with the same relative dynamic. From January to February by 50 %, next months by 33 %, then 25, 20, 17, 14, 13, 11, 10, 9, 8 %.

The eye is sure to see something different. The increase of the bottom most series seems dull compared to the top most. And even a difference in dynamics between the two top most series appears to be plausible.

All wrong.

Sparklines are much better suited. They present the first series as 65, the second as 325 and the third as 390. More general: Want to compare different time series? Then scale them individually. It doesn’t work in one single chart.

No rule without an exception. I did find that one through Bill. A climber can use cracks to secure himself. You need a cam of the right size for that. Modern ones are based on eccentric panels and are high-tech.

Does the cam fit the crack? Look at the traffic light color. Green holds, yellow should hold while the next size would be better. Red doesn’t hold.

Climbing is easier than controlling an enterprise.

Rolf had a great idea: A map is easy to understand, because rivers are blue and forest is green. It took a while before everyone acknowledged that.

Maps are understood, if they adhere to the common notation

In business reporting one day values, currencies, periods and variances are graphed this way and that way the other day. Rolf insists that months are less wide than quarters and quarters are less wide than years.

If such a notation is used consistently, graphical elements not only illustrate proportions but reveal additional content at a glance. This is a milestone in advancing communication between controllers and managers.

Speaking of color: For the Chinese red is a sign of good luck, while in the West it is a sign of danger. But that’s a different story.

Labradores like me like to swim. Can be analytically refreshing, too. On that small islet I met two french school girls. They discussed Saturn and the Earth. How large and how small. One of them hinted to a circular pattern on the floor of the islet. “The large circle, that is Saturn”, she started, “the small one is the Earth, how tiny in comparison.” Very clever those two girls. Much more than many information designers.

Back at the beach I drew that for him in the sand. Than he got it, too.

Many concepts feel like “a solution desperately seeking an application“. Sometimes waiting is futile. Square pies are such an issue.

Wired offers a colorful mystery-pie. It argues that household budgets for tech gadgets haven’t changed much in the recent decade. But money is spent for other gadgets nowadays. Square pies don’t help to understand as Anil Dash and Juice Analytics have shown.

I don’t like that Wired inherently focuses on a chronological development, but doesn’t show it.

“High tech gear gets cheaper every year. So we’re spending a lot less on it, right? Um, no. In fact, the proportion of US household budgets spent on tech products and services — computers, game consoles, cell phone service, cable, TVs — has held steady at about 5 percent for most of the past decade. We’re just spending that money — more than we pay for health insurance — on different stuff. For instance, we spend a lot less on TVs (as prices have dropped) but more on cable and satellite services (we need our HBO). Here’s a peek at how our quest to stay wired hits our wallets.”
Source: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/15–08/st_infoporn

The reader has to grasp that a square which is 23.6 % large has only been X large before. Because it has increased by 72 %. Ah. I didn’t get that. So I made up a table:

I think know you see what the important items are, how the structure changed and what is new. The longer I looked at the data the more I wanted to know. Add share of total and accumulated views. Only for 2005.

In the end it was clear: there is a whole lot in that data. You get it with a simple table.
The link in Wired is named “Infoporn”. Correctly.

He has won the Oscar in informatics: the 2007 Innovation Prize of Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) for his work on “Hybrid Data Mining”.

My friend Chiara has sent me a graph about car colors and color as an attribute. From the German newspaper “Nürnberger Nachrichten”. It’s about the temperature dogs have to endure when in summer they have to wait in a car. Definitely too hot. A special case of small multiples. It emphasizes the differences in varnish variants. Sad: the temperature is hard to read. Red needle on a red scale. Tiny marks. Uff. And each gauge uses much too much space. Numbers would’ve been much better. Directly on the varnish.

Colors could have been sorted from left to right according to temperature. White, red, blue. Interesting: the cool blue is much warmer than the hot red. I rate this graph A‑.

Temperature comparison of varnish colors.