There are two kinds of infographics:
- The kind that deceive
- The kind that clarify
This is the former. Shame on you, Razorfish designer.
EDIT:
My friend and colleague-from-another-agency, Guthrie Dolin (Odopod), helped me get in contact with Garrick Schmitt, the publisher of the FEED report. His tweet in response to my post is copied below.
I appreciate (a) the understanding that it’s not the best way to display the data and (b) that his point wasn’t to highlight/obfuscate. So, that’s good. Thanks, Garrick, for the response.
9 Comments
Haaaa what are they even trying to say with this.
What is this from?
color are soooo sad
+ a small dislexia tendency here…
:-/
Natalie -
Not exactly the point I was going for (the colors don’t really matter one way or the other, and that’s a taste-based argument), but I’m largely concerned that the report isn’t clearly communicating its point.
Thanks for stopping by, though, and thanks for the comment.
Noah -
It’s from the Razorfish FEED report.
The site for the report is here, and the PDF report is here.
Joh -
Right?
YES! Wait. NO! I’m confused.
25% seems pretty high. Aren’t they just pointing out that it’s actually quite significant? Nobody with a couple of braincells would actually be deceived by this.
oh yes, of course colors isn’t the point here, this was an incontrolable spontaneous critic of mine
a ‘dislexia tendency’ was my point, a bit obscure choice of word i must admit :-/ aaah communication… culture… always fascinating how people understand each other… even through graphics 
so what i really wanted to say is: representing a low score in a bigger circle to represent your point is confusing
Mike -
Agree, you’d have to be pretty dense to miss the actual story behind the numbers. But if the point of the image is to illustrate that 25% is significant, I’d have picked something other than circles of different sizes, which tend to indicate proportion.
Natalie -
Agreement! And, thanks for stopping by.