The drama of a simple graphic
In the show, don’t tell category: We could tell learners, “Obesity is an important problem in the US, and people everywhere are getting fatter every year.” Or we could show them a simple animated graphic that has far more punch.
The drama in 2001: Colorado is the last remaining “thin” state. Will it fall? And is red Mississippi a harbinger of worse things to come?
on September 7th, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Nice graphic, but the 5% bins distort the story a bit. in 2001, AL could have been 24.99 % obese, but the colour choice implies a qualitative difference from it’s neighbour. The drama is overwrought, in typical newspaper style. See Tufte for the antidote.
on September 8th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Good point. Clearly, the newspaper opted to tell a story at a glance rather than represent the finer nuances. If the data bins were smaller, the graphic would be more accurate, but there would be more colors, making it harder to whack people with the info. A simple solution would have been to add a rollover that revealed the actual rate of obesity for each state.
Another way to do it might have been to throw out the colors and change each state’s size to represent its rate of obesity, with the accurate size still shown inside the bloated state. But apparently the point of the graphic is to compare states with each other and not with their former selves.