Wired Magazine published (online anyway) an infographic which is so very uninformative and poorly graphic that I gave it a blast in the comments. Fearing that the comments could be deleted, I’ll reproduce comment and stunningly bad graph here. To summarize, the whole point of an infographic is to show a pattern (or lack of a pattern), correlation, or difference which might otherwise be difficult to tease out of data or narrative. Time-series are famous for being scant on meaningful content, and this is their king:
Does this help you to understand anything?
Who made this awful infographic? Pardon this rant; I won’t pretend to organize it, but then I’m not exactly being paid for this product.
The lurid and uninformative purple broken things and their cramped, decidedly non-logarithmic-scale-friendly background demand the bulk of the initially visible* page, whereas informative text is scrunched into columns too narrow for big words, and subordinate to garish icons which themselves must be looked up against a list of poorly-chosen categories. This graphic is so bad that key phrases have been highlighted in yellow in an ill-fated attempt to help them stand out from the confusing and uncorrelated swamp.
Some icons are circles, some are square, some are realist and some are abstract, some are flat and some are faux 3D. WOrst, the two that are shaded for 3D effect are shaded in opposite directions. Where is an icon for the early warning system, mentioned in the embarrassingly tall blade of text growing beneath 2011? You would think that would have made the cut for an infographic on “Quake-Ready Japan”.
To which event does the Tokyo earthquake photo belong, the one to the left or to the right of it? Oh sure, I can do some work and unpack it, but that’s YOUR job. You could move it down below the text, you know, in the zone where the other two photographs are. This would allow you to do something better with the top portion of the graphic anyway. Tying it to this timeline certainly has not helped, and same goes for the bottom.
The bottom portion is not in any sense a timeline–it is a bulleted list constructed horizontally but without the common decency to rotate the text. Its connection to the intended “timeline” is tenuous at best; technically its connected, but visually, not at all.
The Niigata photo is in the wrong place because it presses the edge of the graphic down to well below where it would otherwise be. The fact that it is difficult to relocate it is a symptom of the overall poor organization of this graphic. In the current design, you could have popped it up into the top, you know, right above the text entry for the Niigata quake, and immediately to the left of the Niigata sex-toy ^X^X^X garishly-colored earthquake indicator. In a better design, you–oh nevermind.
By the time you are threading five-segment leaders through an area that looks like circuitry from a motherboard, you are struggling to solve with a pen what you should instead conquer with a wastebasket.
*Finally, this graphic is made poorer by dumping it in an iframe which requires both horizontal and vertical scrollbars. But to make this graphic poorer through presentation is to damage the sun with radiation.
