Taking care of a German pie chart while enjoying German kuchen
Junk Charts 2015-07-01
I was enjoying this yummy piece of German cake the other day.
I started flipping through the recent issue of Stern magazine, and came across this German pie chart that probably presents results from a poll. In particular, it draws attention to changes between the current and the prior poll, I think.
When a pie chart is used to handle data with more than three or four categories, we frequently encounter objects with a rainbow of colors, and a jumble of text labels. In this case, the order of the labels in the legend doesn't match the order of the pie sectors.
In addition, such pie charts almost always fail the self-sufficiency test. All of the data are printed on the chart itself, inviting readers to ignore the visual presentation.
A bumps-style chart works well for this type of data. I tried something different here:
The challenge is to elegantly handle the current data plus the change from the last poll.