For Better Nutrition

From Visual News, a revamped design of a boring nutrition label. Using bar charts and a pie chart, nutritional data is presented in a better and visually more informative way. Also shown at Visual News are redesigns for the myriad of parking signs and also a wine menu. These are from the folks at Column Five Media who produce lots of infographics.

Pie Chart of Dimension

                          My new favorite pie chart. Via Flowing Data.

Pie Rules

"There is no data that can be displayed in a pie chart, that cannot be displayed BETTER in some other type of chart," is a quote Wikipedia attributes to the late, great statistician John Tukey, (I've found no original source for the quote). It gets worse when Excel and/or graphic designers start adding chart junk of 3-D projections in hope of adding more visual interest.

Any reasonable comparisons in the above chart are impossible.

If you insist on using pie charts, Benjamin Starr at Visual News offers some history and sensible guidelines for using pie charts.

First, as the lead-in graphic above illustrates, display no more than five categories in a pie chart. Many small areas are difficult to compare.

Second, since wedges of a pie are difficult to compare side-by-side, Starr says don't use multiple pie charts for comparison. Use stacked bar charts instead, as shown above.

Third, make sure that the percentages add up to 100% and that all slices are drawn proportionately to the percentages they purport to represent.

And finally, order the slices from largest to smallest, starting at 12 o'clock and continuing either clockwise or counter-clockwise to aid in comprehension.

Of course, we've posted some pie charts here and had some fun with them.

In Honor of Pi Day last Friday

In honor of Pi day this past Friday, March 14. I posted this long ago in 2008. It is still my favorite pie chart.

What pie did you have on Thanksgiving?

What is your favorite pie? Did you have it for Thanksgiving? Here is a pie chart based on a National Public Radio report of a survey of America's favorite pies. The ultimate pie chart is, of course, here.

Friday Fun: Comparing Apples & Oranges

A totally fair, balanced, unbiased comparison. Really. No really! See more of this chart at: smarter.org via junkcharts.

The Ultimate Pie Chart

via: reddit
Nothing more need be said!

Cake Chart

You've heard of pie charts. Here are Cake Charts. The cake's decoration is designed to be the proportions of each cake's ingredients. As the site says, "Decoration becomes information."

Such data are called compositional data. The previous post had compositional data on national flags. Here is one of my research papers on modeling compositional data.

Pie Flags

Here is a site that shows the flags of the nations of the world as pie charts of their flag's colors. Click on the site's charts to see what country it belongs to.