The mistake that you can easily avoid
Incremental Improvements #01: Small multiples
This is the beginning of a series of posts about incremental improvements, that can be done in order to make a good design even better. In each post, I’ll analyze the data visualization to see what works, what doesn’t, and what to do to improve it.
Original chart by The Economist
I’ll probably throw myself into deep water by starting with The Economist chart but so be it. First, I have to say that I truly like the overall simplicity of it and the fact that everything can be seen at a glance. You can easily see when the countries introduced the restrictions to flatten the curve but did you spotted that the Economist did the opposite? By changing the scale they enhanced the curve, so it makes it quite impossible to make an accurate comparison.
Good data visualization solutions✔️
Elements that work in this chart?
- Clean look and limited chart junk — removing the recurrent information and limiting the marks on axes to only two per row
