Watching a valiant effort to rescue the pie chart

Today we return to the basics. In a twitter exchange with Dean E., I found the following pie chart in an Atlantic article about who's buying San Francisco real estate:

The pie chart is great at one thing, showing how workers in the software industry accounted for half of the real estate purchases. (Dean and I both want to see more details of the analysis as we have many questions about the underlying data. In this post, I ignore these questions.)

After that, if we want to learn anything else from the pie chart, we have to read the data labels. This calls for one of my key recommendations: make your charts sufficient. The principle of self-sufficiency is that the visual elements of the data graphic should by themselves say something about the data. The test of self-sufficiency is executed by removing the data printed on the chart so that one can assess how much work the visual elements are performing. If the visual elements require data labels to work, then the data graphic is effectively a lookup table.

This is the same pie chart, minus the data:

Almost all pie charts with a large number of slices are packed with data labels. Think of the labeling as a corrective action to fix the shortcoming of the form.

Here is a bar chart showing the same data:

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Let's look at all the efforts made to overcome the lack of self-sufficiency.

Here is a zoom-in on the left side of the chart:

Data labels are necessary to help readers perceive the sizes of the slices. But as the slices are getting smaller, the labels are getting too dense, so the guiding lines are being stretched.

Eventually, the designer gave up on labeling every slice. You can see that some slices are missing labels:

The designer also had to give up on sequencing the slices by the data. For example, hardware with a value of 2.4% should be placed between Education and Law. It is shifted to the top left side to make the labeling easier.

Fitting all the data labels to the slices becomes the singular task at hand.