• Frank
• Mar 4,2008
• In: Blog

Square Pie Charts?

They appear quite frequently in the New York Times, I’ve noticed, even if the fine and sensible The Economist shuns them.

Square pie charts seem to be more visually confusing, since our brains read information into the placement of the component rectangles, even if none was particularly intended.

Is it art? Well, perhaps, but it sure ain’t a good graph. Then again, are pie charts good graphs in general?

A table is nearly always better than a dumb pie chart; the only worse design than a pie chart is several of them […] Given their low data-density and failure to order numbers along a visual dimension, pie charts should never be used.

–Edward Tufte (the god of graphs), The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, pp. 178

While this may seem an academic and irrelevant discussion to most, it’s yet another example of how The Onion is increasingly becoming similar to the real media.