Exercise 02 – Tufte´s four essential guidelines

CS_exercise_02

CS_exercise_02

by Corvin Springer -
Number of replies: 0


I chose this visual representation of how much plastic is contributed from each country or region to which seas. I have just loaded in a still of this graphic, but if you want to check it out it's interactive (https://dumpark.com/seas-of-plastic-infographic/).

So starting with graphical excellence, there is quite a bit of information almost hidden here in this mess of colours. So while I think it looks quite messy and maybe difficult to understand at the beginning it's very well done if you understand the logic behind it and can follow the different lines, helped when you can choose which ones to display, like in the interactive model, of course. There are a lot of numbers and relations represented in a very small space. 

The visual integrity is quite hard to determine, the proportions between the different countries seem to be accurate and you can read clearly which ones produce most of the plastic and were it goes. So I would say the visual integrity is good as long as you don't have all of the countries switched on like in the example above, then the information gets quite muddled.

Where the Data-Ink ratio is concerned I would say that most of the ink that is visible is needed to convey an information of quantity or size or origin, so again while it looks very full and overwhelming to start with, I don't think you could leave very much away and not loose the information you are trying to portray.

And lastly for aesthetic elegance, I would say that it very nicely visually represents the data without having to add much text or numbers to make it understandable.

So overall I would say, for the information presented, the graph is very close in all aspect to what Tuft proposed makes a good visual representation of data. Especially when considering the interactive model, that eradicates much of the problems that the static one has that I have uploaded.