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Check out this fun page by the Lake Sun.
The centerpiece story, written by Joyce Miller, updates readers on lake cleanup efforts. WIth more than 525 miles of shoreline, I'm sure it's quite a project just to line up volunteers.
The page includes some data visualization and images that show the kinds of junk found during cleanupe efforts.
Though its a nice page worthy of today's selection, there are some things worh noting:
First of all, the smaller issue is the placement of the centerpiece. Pushing the visuals to the right side makes the page feel imbalanced. The vertical package on the right forces the rule to run right down the center of the page, which attracts a lot of attentioin. The three stories stacked in columns two and three look great, but they would have looked better on the right side of the page.
Secondly, and of much more importance, the data visualization attempts to show how much trash has been picked up in the each of the last two years, as well as over the last 20 years. The tall stack of bags full of garbage indicates 5 million pounds of garbage have been removed. The shorter stacks reflect the pounds of garbage colleged in 2010 and 2011. In 2010, 260,000 pounds was picked up. In 2011, 140,000 pounds.
The stacks are meant to be a quick and easy comparison for readers, but the problem here is the proportions are incorrect.
When using visuals to represent data, the visuals need to be as exact as the data.
To show a true proportion, I created the graphic below:
You can see the two smaller bars are significantly shorter than the tall bar representing 5 million pounds. These bars for this example were created in QuarkXPress. I drew a box that has a depth of 500 points for the tall bar. The 500 points is the same as taking off four zeros from 5,000,000. For the smalelr bars, I used 14 points and 26 points to represent 140,000 and 160 respectively.
Charles Apple, a visual journalim blogger, wrote about a similar occurence in a Canadian newspaper just last week:
To a discriminating reader would have reason, now, to doubt this entire presentation. And, by extension, perhaps the story, too.
You have to be very, very careful when you get cute with charting elements. A little more care here might have helped tremendously.
Read Apple's full post about The Gazette here (it's about midway down).
I took the liberty of creating a new Lake Sun front page to correct the issues I mentioned above:
On this page I moved the stacked stories to the right, the main package to the center and gave it a few tweaks. Here's what I did:
• Made the tallest bar shorter to allow more space for a larger photo.
• Because the pounds of trash collected for 2010 and 2011 are part of the total, I put them on one bar and added some details about the numbers.
• Modified the text for the items found during cleanup
Being clever with visuals is always a good idea. But it's better to be accurate.
Oh, love that great skybox item to the re-release of the Star Wars movie! Super!
Nice page.
Joe Greco is corporate design director for GateHouse Media.
Contact him at jgreco@gatehousemedia.com.
Missed front page of the day? Find the archive here.
