A1-JohnsonNguyen
From CS294-10 Visualization Fa07
Contents |
[edit] Good Visualization
Source: U.S. News & World Report - February 19, 2007 Issue, Page 81
[edit] Deconstruction
From a handful of good visualizations I had, I could not get my mind off this one. It may or may not be clear from the quality of the image, but several points stand out that make this visualization well thought-out and more importantly, successful in achieving its goal. Keep in mind this is an advertisement to give Sony Corporation the edge over other camera competitors
- Quality & Color
- Notice that the artist chose cameras that looked the same so as to level the playing field.
- Provides visual evidence that there exists many lens to choose from to achieve stability.
- Placement
- Two big name competitors are placed beneath the main.
- Sony's camera is put in front of a nice backdrop of lenses. With perspective in mind, it almost seems like an army is backing up the camera.
- It is front and center.
- Size
- Sony camera is pictured 3 times bigger.
- The competing cameras look miniscule.
[edit] Bad Visualization
Source: Cornell Alumni Magazine - January/February 2007 Issue, Page 19
[edit] Deconstruction
This visualization has haunted me over and over again and I finally get a chance to do something about it. The picture is attempting to show Cornell University's fund campaign over the course of five years. The money would be put to several uses including faculty, facilites, students, and other unrestricted purposes. What is pictured is the prominent clock tower, one of Cornell's greatest landmark. Cornell loves the idea of using the clock tower in all of its images, even though its relevance to the matter at hand is quite ambiguous.
- The creator takes an image of the clock tower and puts a box around part of the image (not around the whole thing as you'd expect, he likes to leave out the tip and the bottom chunk of the picture) in hopes of making it into some form of bar chart.
- There was no consideration as to ordering the importance of the funding, putting the miscellaneous funds at the top. I think he/she was just trying to put the smallest amount at the top, which is acceptable but maybe hierarchy should have been considered.
- There is a strange gradient that I've yet to figure out why it's there.
- What reason is there to even stack the amounts like that? Campaigning for money to help the school in various ways doesn't mean that if we only get a billion that it would only go into "Faculty and program support." It would obviously be spread amongst several areas - maybe a percentage would have sufficed.
- Since I'm already going off on it, I might as well say that the numbers dont add up to 4 billion either :)
The above is just one example of how Cornell University has used this image in its charts, but I assure you, there are many occurences of the clock tower being placed in charts for mere sake of having a backdrop.
[edit] Redesign
The redesign futures a few new modifications including:
- Accurately calculating the percentages so it equals 100%
- More relevant images to go along with each section of funding
- New percentages to give the audience an idea of the priority of the spending
- Ordered the sections in order of importance to the user
- Introduction of a legend at the bottom of the chart
The newly designed visualization takes away certain assumptions that are present in the bad design. There is not one blanket image that covers all four areas and there is also a more meaningful ordering to the sections, as opposed to it being ordered from smallest to largest.
