Improve Your Graphics, Pt. 2
In Part 1, we found more reasons to remove the borders that most Microsoft products insert by default. Today, we’ll focus on legends and keys.
An important duty of any graphic is to reduce the time required to understand the data. The data in the graphic below are the two entities responsible (Government/manufacturer), a total for each, the combined total, and the relative contribution of each entity. Identifying the lonely numbers using a key means the viewer must look back and forth twice, slowing the understanding who is responsible for each number. Especially with this spare amount of data, disposing with the key is simple.
Integrate words, numbers, and images—it’s all data. In the new graphic below, we moved the words from the box and put them next to the numbers, and removed the redundant border between the colors of the pie chart. No more visually jumping back and forth; understanding at one glance!
There will be some instances when borders can help to make your graphic compliant with Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act, which requires Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities. We will cover this in later posts.
Bonus tip: Pie charts lose their effectiveness with more than five or six data points.
This example contains small multiples. There are eight pairs of bars comparing amounts, and as soon as one pair is identified, the remaining pairs are understood; no key or legend needed. The tallest pair draws attention, so the labels were placed there.
Justifying the text on opposite sides and matching the font color to the corresponding bar reinforces the relationship.
There is a limit to the number data that need to be identified without a key before the graphic becomes too crowded for rapid data transfer. The same can happen even with a key.
Whatever the intended point of this graphic, it was buried under too many lines.
One solution is to choose a smaller subset of the data—in this recreation, the high and low data sets are saved, along with one data set from the middle. The default Microsoft settings for a line graph cluttered the field with a scale on the side, horizontal lines for that scale, and a key to slow down data transfer.
In our recreation, the scales and lines are replaced with numbers on the lines and names (inserted in text boxes) near their lines in the same color as their lines. Those lines were made thinner and smoothed
Your report would probably need the entire data set from the original, confusing graphic. That data would be best presented in a table. Check out our posts about tables here, here, and here.
Let us know in the comments how you simplify your graphics and any questions you have about how certain changes were made.
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