Dilma Roussef, Brazil’s President, appeared today on the O Globo website, one of Brazil,s biggest newspapers. The headline reads “Dilma installs Truth Commission, gets emotional and cries”, referring to the commission created to uncover information from the so-far secret files of Brazil’s military regime, that lasted from 1964 to 1985.
The picture that followed the headline shows Dilma pulling the tip of her nose, as if to stretch it. The reference to “growing nose” right under the headline about the Truth Commission may be read as contradictory.
And, a few hours after posting the image on its homepage, O Globo might have had noticed it too… Since they later changed it for a new image and a new headline for the article, in place of the Truth/Pinocchio one.
—thanks to Samara Tanaka for catching it and sending me this tip! ;)
The design of information graphics consists, basically, in arranging data in a visual way that conveys a message. Building a message involves various aspects, and one of them is orientation.
Our western cultural bias tells us that time progresses from left to right, and quantity grows upwards. Therefore, up means gain and right means progress in time.
from Volkswagen 2010 Annual Report
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But what happens when information graphics do not follow this cultural convention? The chart below shows financial results from 2005 to 2009, but starts with the later year, moving right towards the earlier year. In a glimpse, the reader might have the negative feeling that sales are decreasing and be alarmed when, in fact, the sales have been increasing.
from Inditex 2009 Annual Report
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Below, in one chart, we see two choices of time-progression orientation. Presenting information in this way can be very confusing for the reader, causing a distraction that can be useful, depending on whether you want to emphasize or understate results.
from Bertelsmann 2010 Annual Report
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By trading the “up means gain” notion for “right means progress” when dealing with quantities, a horizontal bar chart can give the impression of progress toward a goal, with the longer bars seeming to be closer to the goal.
from Japan Post Bank 2010 Annual Report
Many times, however, there is no “goal” to be achieved (or the goal is not relevant to the chart), and displaying quantities in a horizontal bar chart can make the comparison confusing for the reader.
from Lloyds 2010 Annual Report
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In the chart below, the attention is driven to the longest bar, but that result is from three years ago.
from Adidas 2009 Annual Report
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Here, the difference in color drives attention to 09, even though 08 and 07 had better sales. But how would it look if this data had been portrayed as a usual xy chart?
from Boeing 2009 Annual Report
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“Conveying the right message”
from http://www.fastcodesign.com/1664719/infographic-of-the-day-why-should-you-care-about-typography
Today, most newspapers around the world bring the same terrible news on their first pages: the tragedy in Japan. Never before has a natural disaster had so many quality pictures and footage, which provided for a stunning coverage.
Naturally, those amazing images were bound to end up on front pages around the globe, and the impact of such a tragic event calls for dramatic headlines to go along with shocking pictures.
below: Melbourne’s Herald Sun (Australia), Jaipur’s Rajasthan Patrika (India), New York’s New York Post (USA) and Berlin’s Bild (Germany).
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Some newspapers, on the other hand, chose to focus on facts others than casualties. Bogota’s La Republica (Colombia) showed a strong picture of devastation, but with no fire or desolated faces of victims. Here, the emphasis of the image is on the destructive power of nature, instead of on human suffering. The headline took the economic approach: “Tsunami in Japan made stoke exchanges of the world tremble. Losses are estimated in US$ 10,000 millions.”
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From Germany, comes a real piece of gold in minimalism. The always-elegant Frankfurter Allgemeine covered the tragedy using an image that shows the giant power of that earthquake, without showing any burning house, upiside-down ship or destroying wave. It shows a single picture on its front page: the register of the seismic waves from the earthquake on a seismometer.
Here is an extract from How to lie with charts, a very clever book. I found this text interesting not only because it deals with the rhetorical use of orientation in charts, but also because it makes a valid point: that using rhetoric and cultural biases to the advantage of the communication is not unethical. In my opinion, knowing how to use them is not only unethical, but it is an essential skill for a communicator.
“Which of this signs might make a Western traveler feel more “positive” about a choice of routes?
Never mind that there is only one spot to place the sign in an airport terminal and the arrow must go the other way. Certainly, you can’t go pointing people in the wrong direction just to make them feel better. And no one would ignore a helpful left-pointing sign because of such a vague feeling. But, be aware that people carry those biases with them, no matter which way they decide to turn. You might not have any choice about which design to use in the airport situation, but you could give careful consideration to how you would use the same sign inside a store to direct shoppers to a merchandise display.
When your audience shares a set of biases, a chart will be more effective if its design plays to those assumptions deliberately. For example, you can probably assume that Westerners will interpret rightward motion as progress. Use that prejudice to your advantage! Don’t try to neutralize their biases, which probably isn’t possible anyway. Simply make your designs consistent with what they expect.
It might seem somehow unethical to reinforce these prejudices, but realize that you can’t escape them. Graphic conventions are as much a part of language as speech. Your choice of the language itself depends upon many conventions, including these notions of direction. Different sets of assumptions and visual biases will apply, for example, to native speakers of Hebrew, Arabic, and Farsi (who read right to left) or Chinese (who sometimes read top to bottom).
In short, your charts aren’t international signs. You can’t make them cross-cultural, and you shouldn’t try. They will always have more impact if you are aware of cultural biases and play shamelessly to them!”
— JONES, Gerald Everett. How to lie with charts. La Puerta. Santa Monica, 2007. p.46-7
In a 3D pie chart, the slice with the thickest edge will always seem larger than its true percentage.
In a 3D bar chart, it’s a challenge to find a rotation at which the short bars are still visible but the tall bars aren’t distorted by the perspective. Judging the heights of bars in a perspective view is a real challenge. So your audience can’t reliably estimate values (do visual take-offs) from your dimensional bars."
The tragic shooting in Arizona, U.S.A. was followed by a controversy involving Sarah Palin’s campaign “Let’s take back the 20!”
The use of cross-hairs aiming at the 20 Democrat’s districts (including Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’), was connected to incitation of violence. How could it not be? How could gun references and the use of words such as “reload!” not be linked to violence? Wasn’t this the rhetorical path chosen for this piece?
Graphic design is never neutral.
Ornating information: information is political, in the way we use it.
Nice debate about information graphics.
INFOGRAPHIC PRINTS (via information aesthetics)
Take a look at these images from Jornal Nacional, the main TV news program in Brazil. Two nights ago, they announced the US$/BRL rate had dropped. They used a line chart. The angle of the line is big. Major drop? No. It was a 0,05% drop (from 1,723 to 1,722).
Then last night, it was up. A much bigger difference, at +0,34%. The line chart? It is there. The angle of the line? The same.
Conclusion? It is not a line chart. It indicates just a binary information: if the rate is up or down. Isn’t the up/down arrow already doing exactly that? So why use a line-graphic-like image, that implies the idea of “angle=quantity of change”?
Earlier in the week:
