If you haven’t seen it already, Information is Beautiful posted a wonderful inforgraphic the other day on the Kyoto Protocal Targets. (I’ll just reproduce a fragment here).
I KNOW! I did diss Information is Beautiful previously, but I like this one. (Which is odd, because there are comments about readability).
It shows how the design decision to make data close to its MEANING rather than its structure works! I mean, really, we don’t want to see that Poland is 2.4% closer to target than the Slovak Republic; all we want is a general overview: which countries are doing well, and which ones suck like…well, are doing badly.
So what makes this good?
- Representation: there is a familiar style: the style is – of course – like a dartboard, directly playing on ‘bullseye’ and immediately giving readers something to base their interpretation on.
- Information AND Data: the pre-ordering and categorisation of ‘Bullseye!’, ‘On Target’, etc, make it super easy to know what you’re looking at. It’s *information* not *data*! Why would you order this by country name, for instance (there aren’t that many data points to warrant that, even)?
- Textual Context: okay, so datavis should be about the data and the visual, right? True, but where textual explanations and descriptions help, they can do wonders, as in this case. The commentary makes it that much easier to understand.
- Feeling: the countries placed under ‘Fail’ have absolutely no hope in garnering any sort of sympathy from someone who has seen this. It’s sort of biased, yes, but if we don’t get people to feel things when they look at a visualisation, what hope is there that they remember anything?
Of course, there are a few tiny things. I would have made the target the red one, and maybe left the models of what a ‘good’/etc (but perhaps having the countries is good enough).
What’s more, there’s a little bit of process behind it, which makes it that much more interesting.
5 Comments
If you make the middle red, you’ll confuse the archers in the audience http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=archery+target
true. although is there a chance that it’s a little more intuitive with red in the middle… or, perhaps with red as the target and other colours. I don’t know… that takes away from the familiarity! narf.
Hi,
It’s another good looking piece of design from Information is Beautiful. I disagree with your analysis though. If as you say “all we want is a general overview: which countries are doing well, and which ones suck” then all we need is a list of countries in order of how they’re doing and the rest is noise, why not just draw a nice picture? Elucidating the data should be a core aim of any information graphic.
The top level catagorisation is useful and provides a good framework for a visualisation of the data but is only necessary here because the graphic fails to make the data even slightly accesible. The idea of equating emissions targets with archery targets only compounds the confusion of the original “byzantine graph“.
The single most obvious property of each “target” – it’s overall size – has no bearing on the most important part of the information, who’s doing well and who’s doing badly (goodies and baddies both have big circles). Anyway, if you’re trying to hit an archery target the thing that matters is how close the arrow is to the center not how big the thing is. As the designer notes in the comments thread the target metaphore is stretched too far and if readers do, as you suggest, base their reading of this on an understanding of archery targets they’re going to have a tough time.
Getting down to the nitty gritty, I think the key problem is the representation of single dimensional data in two dimensions, this choice leads to most of the legibility issues, not least because a single variable (% on target and % under target are the same thing) has to be represented by two separate colours owing to the inability of the circles to represent both -ve and +ve values. Looking at the development sketches it seems the designer was wedded to the idea of using circles from an early stage. Circles appear regularly in his other visualisations so I’d suggest that it’s an aesthetic preference rather than a response to the specific data set at hand.
One thing these hand crafted visualisations have over those produced by some automated process (google charts, excel etc.) is that they can respond in meaningful and specific ways to the data they are based on this is a bold attempt to do just that but for me it doesn’t pay off.
-T
hi Tom, amazing comment; perhaps you should be writing this blog, not me!
I agree with most of your comments, although there is one thing I think your analysis is missing, which is the power of engagement. now, I don’t have figures on this or anything and it’s a little bt of a hunch, but judging by reactions and comments, if this graphic was published in a mainstream newspaper I think it would get a lot of eyeballs. why? because people see it as being familiar, then, they might see the data being about something relevant and interesting, then, they try and decipher it.
so, yes, it’s not Tuftian-fine-tuned, but it elicits a response, which is not everyhing, but is helpful.
Aw shucks!
Seriously though, I totally agree that engagement is really important when it comes to grabbing the casual reader but once you’ve snared them – which Information is Beautiful does brilliantly every time; interesting/ provocative subject matter + colourful, arresting visual design – you’ve got to get down to the job of helping your audience go away more informed (if that’s your goal, sometimes we can use info viz for the opposite purpose).
I think any critical take on info viz etc. needs to take into account what the graphic aims to achieve and judge it by those standards. Is the visualization purely informational or is it putting forward an argument? Does it aim to invite exploration of data or highlight particular aspects? or is it just trying to look nice? (usually some combination of the above). Obviously most of the time those aims aren’t published alongside the chart so we have to infer from context. I don’t really know what I’m getting at here but I expect our different takes come from having different expectations regarding the aims of the graphic.
Anyway, looking forward to more provocative posts.
-T