This infographic is designed to convey information about shopping and gifting trends over the holiday seasons in the years 2004 to 2015.
http://visual.ly/christmas-and-new-year-holidays-around-world
The entire infographic is full of badly executed visualizations, but I am going to pick one bar chart in particular to comment on – “Per Person Holiday Spending” which shows the average per customer spend over the years 2004 to 2015.
I liked a few things about this chart –
- The title is bold and clear, the user understands immediately what the chart is about. To that end, the designer has made all the titles bold to make them pop out and be effective.
- The x and y axes units are uniformly scaled with 1 year increments and 20$ increments respectively.
Things I didn’t like about the chart –
- COLORS – The colors are neither uniformly used nor visually pleasing. The designer has used 4 different colors in no particular sequence. On first glance, you think that a certain color (red for instance) means something in terms of year or amount being spent when it has no meaning at all. The colors have been randomly placed for each year.
- 3D BARS – 3D representation of this bar chart was unnecessary. If you look closely, the top of the bars are not uniform – the viewer’s perspective is skewed. Although this does not affect any information being communicated, it is an eye sore and adds to the overall visual chaos that this chart is.