Light entertainment

A co-worker offered this one:

From here.

Comments

[ZBicyclist]

Wow. What do you even call those triangle and trapezoid thingies? Do they have a name in the graphic literature?

[Bernard Lebelle]

Well you might get a bit of those types in Excel "advanced feature" options...
I doubt though that anyone following information visualisation best in class recommandation would even consider using that approach...
The lack of scale both on company ranking on the "Reputation index" and on the frequency / impact of buzz (positive or negative regardless of the medium) doesn't help the reader in the slightest

[derek]

ZBicyclist, in Excel terms it's just "area series". Strangely enough, the triangles at least have the virtue that their area is proportional to their height. The overlapping compromises even that, though.

[Nudger]

OK - I made the chart, and deserve everything that's been thrown at it. But - in my (lame) defense. I'm a physicist by training (Ph.D. even), so quantitative graphics are second nature. But this one was purposely meant to be a cartoon - first, because of the subject (peanut butter, pot and Pop Tarts), and second, because it was designed as a eye-catcher in a blogpost that explained quantitatively what was going on. So the chart alone (i.e. out of the blogpost context) is hard to understand.

As a chart, is it seriously ugly. As a cartoon, it worked, because it got us great coverage (from CNN Lou Dobbs to the Atlantic to PerezHilton).

Cheers,

Nick DiGiacomo
Co-founder, Vanno
and the guy who made the chart ;-)