CIRCLE INFOGRAPHIC HOW TO
CIRCLE INFOGRAPHIC SOFTWARE

First, adding colored connecting lines is one way to make it easier for the audience to find the related circles in the columns sorted in descending order. I would recommend one of two alternate improvements. Sticking with the circles data visualization style, I wanted to take the design a little bit further. Placing the text next to each circle keeps the information in the reader’s field of view which minimizes eye movement. This makes the whole visualization easier for the audience to read by eliminating the need to look back-and-forth from the circles to the color legend to figure out what each circle represents. I made one other improvement to the corrected design above by removing the color legend and listing the charities and causes of death right next to the appropriate circles.

CIRCLE INFOGRAPHIC HOW TO

So many designers, that I included an entire section on this topic in the Cool Infographics book to help designers understand how to size the area of circles. My Google Docs spreadsheet of the correct circle area and diameter calculations is available here.Īssuming this was a design mistake, and there was no intent to deceive the audience, this is a common mistake that many designers make.

To demonstrate, I created this corrected version of the infographic. It takes some geometry calculations in a spreadsheet to find the areas and then calculate the appropriate diameters for each circle. Designers make the mistake of adjusting the diameter of circles to match the data instead of the area, which incorrectly sizes the circles dramatically.

CIRCLE INFOGRAPHIC SOFTWARE

The Vox Media story and infographic already have over 12,000 shares on Facebook, and this is a great case study for designers to understand how important it is to visualize data accurately.Īs readers, we see the area of two-dimensional shapes on the page to represent the different values, but design software only allows width and height adjustments to size shapes. They start with the assumption that a visualization accurately represents the data. This causes problems because readers often just look at the visuals without reading the actual numbers. This is a false visualization and significantly over exaggerates the smaller amounts of money contributed to each charity and the deaths attributed to each cause. The problem with this design is that the circle sizes don’t match the values shown. Diseases That Kill Us, that used proportionally sized circles as its data visualization. Last week, the article The Truth about the Ice Bucket Challenge by Julia Belluz on Vox Media included the infographic, Where We Donate vs. Accuracy is the most important aspect of an infographic design!

Circle infographic