This is Not my Beautiful Chart

In: Graphic Design (bad) Politics

15 Apr 2011

The 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.

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7 Responses to This is Not my Beautiful Chart

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Bo

April 15th, 2011 at 4:08 pm

I thought porn was explicit images that are created for excitement and satisfaction?

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David

April 15th, 2011 at 10:00 pm

Well, the data is also interesting. The big chart in the center is not too bad, but I see what you meant: he put aesthetics before usability with the smaller pie charts.

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Scott

April 17th, 2011 at 6:31 am

I don’t know, the dot pie chart seems to be the traditional way to show party affiliation in legislatures. But saying that 44% of the population is Democrat is pretty outdated… Currently, Democrats are at about 35%, Republicans at 34%. Unless the chart itself is really old, I can’t think of any good reason to have Democrats so high, unless the goal is to mislead your readers.

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Matt

April 19th, 2011 at 3:20 pm

Talk about viewing the world through race/gender/creed lenses.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

White men have dominated because of the wealth and influence they brought over from Europe. But as our current president demonstrated, wealth and skin color don’t mean jack when people want change.

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Raphael

May 5th, 2011 at 1:51 pm

I disagree–the red/blue color choice is harldy arbitrary. Anything besides that would be misleading.

The other colors? Well, maybe you can criticize that. Using browns for races and pink/blue for gender is kind of groan-worthy.

And one dot to equal one representative–that’s pretty effective.

I think the message is pretty obvious, without the text: The two distributions are way different.

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cole

June 24th, 2011 at 12:40 am

Wow, I’ve longed wished death to pie charts (our eyes do not to a good job of attributing quantitative values to 2D spaces. In plain english: pie charts are really hard for people to read!). But this dot-donut thing is perhaps even worse! I also agree with your ick-ick classification of the chosen color scheme.

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john

November 24th, 2011 at 6:13 am

i like the way you represented the data in the dotted pie. I have a query regarding the filling of each dots in pie, How you have filled this dots in pie?

As i am a software developer i want know is there any alogorithm to fill the dots in pie ??

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