Wednesday, September 12, 2007

A new way to distort graphs

As I was flipping through a magazine today I came across a new way to distort graphs that I had not seen before. They used some statistics from the KPMG consulting organization. Here is the original graph that KPMG created:

Well designed and clear. Now here is what was published in Backbone magazine:


What is with the bizarre slanting of the graph? It distorts the reality of the message and makes the source of the data look bad because viewers think the original graph was this confusing. The KPMG graph was well designed, but this one confuses because the viewer can't really tell where the bars on the graph end. The longest bar at 66% looks like it goes to the 75% mark on the horizintal axis. Not sure if they thought this would look "cool" or not. But it sure is confusing.

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