Aarni's personal notes on design
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Infographics are a supposed to make business, statistical, or scientific information easier to understand and learn. Most people prefer visual data presentation over numerical. There are great examples of good infographics, but there are also countless examples of the opposite. Infographics are becoming “eye candies” that are unintentionally or intentionally confusing.
There is one tendency among information graphics that I'll have to criticize. It is the use of circles. As Stephen Few points out in his article “Our Irresistible Fascination with All Things Circular” we humans are drawn to circles. His article contains examples of poor presentation of data with circular objects like pies and gauges.
I find one particular use of circles in infographics especially misguiding. The image bellow visualizes the dilemma. How would you compare the relative areas of the two circles that overlap? The right answer is that the area of the outer circle is twice the area of the smaller one! The same data presented in a “boring” bar graph makes the comparison much easier. That is because we humans can estimate heights much better than areas. The same notion applies to pie charts.
I found an extreme example of the use of circles in this infographic from GDS Digital. What do you think about it?
