An infographic showing up here for the right reason

Infographics do not have to be "data ornaments" (link). Once in a blue moon, someone finds the right balance of pictures and data. Here is a nice example from the Wall Street Journal, via ThumbsUpViz.

 

 

Link to the image

 

What makes this work is that the picture of the running back serves a purpose here, in organizing the data.  Contrast this to the airplane from Consumer Reports (link), which did a poor job of providing structure. An alternative of using a bar chart is clearly inferior and much less engaging.

(insert)

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I went ahead and experimented with it:

 

I fixed the self-sufficiency issue, always present when using bubble charts. In this case, I don't think it matters whether the readers know the exact number of injuries so I removed all of the data from the chart.

Here are  three temptations that I did not implement:

• Not include the legend
• Not include the text labels, which are rendered redundant by the brilliant idea of using the running guy
Hide the bar charts behind a mouseover effect.