Graphic Design (bad) Archive:
Dogs on a Farm
13 Sep 2012Either I’m not reading this correctly, or the person who created it has never actually seen a dog on a farm – they are some of the happiest creatures to ever walk the earth.
Global Facebook Friendships
11 Sep 2012Ok, maybe I’m just in a bad mood because I’m back at work after a nice long vacation – but I think this visualization sucks. All it does is ordinally identify the top five linked countries for each country. There is no scale. What does the bubble size indicate? No matter what country you click on, the top five all grow to about the same size. Is the 4th relationship really almost as strong as the 2nd? Who knows? The methodology states “Rankings between countries are based on the number of Facebook friendships between countries and the total number of Facebook friendships within each country.” Ummm… how, exactly? Is it a ratio? Is the total number used as a weight? Thankfully they color coded it based on the continents – because everyone has trouble identifying those, right? Oh, and Seychelles will be happy to know it’s now in Asia. Totally useless.
More Drought
In: Environment/weather Graphic Design (bad) Interactive Maps
30 Jul 2012Four maps (one of them with interactive annotations), a bar chart, and a related article – and none of them explain how “drought” is defined. What is the difference between severe, extreme, and exceptional drought? They all sound terrible.
In search of context, I went to the Drought Monitor site, where I found more cool looking maps and animated gifs…
… and finally a “what is drought” section, and a link to a comparison of major drought indices and indicators (none of which explained how the categories used by the drought monitor are defined), and a link back to monitor site. At which point I gave up.
11 Reasons Your Infographic Isn’t an Infographic
28 Jun 2012Ian Lurie provides an entertaining list of reasons why crap link-bait infographics aren’t really infographics at all.
Rise and Fall of Online Empires
23 Mar 2012I looked at this for several minutes before noticing that they never actually say what they’re measuring on the charts. <sigh> ALWAYS LABEL YOUR AXIS!!!
The Big Numbers
12 Jan 2012Some of the data points here are interesting, but I think it throws together too many different data types. Mass fatalities count as “Human Gatherings”?!? The colors are beyond drab, and the spiral just adds to the confusion. In summary: Ick.
Iraq and Afghanistan Casualties
In: Graphic Design (bad) Interactive Maps Politics Source: Washington Post Source: WSJ
19 Dec 2011There are a lot of these graphs out there. What I like about this presentation from the WSJ is that each dot in each bar can be clicked on for a short biography of the person who died – a nice combination of information and gravitas.
CNN’s tool maps out where they came from and where they died, and provides an area for others to leave memories for each fallen. While information rich, this one felt very sterile to me, and I couldn’t find anyone that had the “memories” section filled in.
The NYT’s went strangely artsy, with a digitized mosaic menu of the fallen’s faces:
The Washington Post’s Faces of the Fallen feature does a good job of presenting summary information, as well as photos of each soldier:
And the Huffington post comes up with the least interactive, self-identified as interactive (ALL CAPS IN THE TITLE!!!), series of charts I’ve even seen. Pretty sad.
Cougars and Cubs
5 Oct 2011Using one of the more sexist charts in recent memory, the dating site whatsyourprice.com attempts to explain that the Ashton Kutcher/Demi Moore breakup is perfectly understandable. While this at first glance this resembles some of the quality revealed preference work done over at OkCupid, the selection bias here is quite large – along with a number of other flaws (as Adam Weinstein points out over at MotherJones).
How Much is Your Life Worth?
9 Sep 2011
This is Not my Beautiful Chart
15 Apr 2011The only thing good about this infographic is the title. Massive dot pie chart? Ick. Color selection? Ick ick. And since you have to read the text and numbers for any kind of comprehension to take place, why bother with the pies at all? Man, I’m grumpy today.
US Energy Production and Consumption
23 Jan 2011
Facebook vs Twitter 2010
4 Jan 2011I usually try to avoid Facebook/Twitter infographics because 1) there are too damn many of them; 2) they don’t convey much information; and 3) most of them are badly designed. The one below manages to convey some very interesting comparative information, but I can’t help but think it could be better. Perhaps separating out each indicator so they can be compared side by side instead of constantly jumping back and forth between the two circles? Is this a good example of how graphic designers have to choose between aesthetics and ease of use? Anyone want to take a crack at a do-over?
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