infauxgraphics and pie charts
Love this! Excerpted from The Infauxgraphic Epidemic:
Seriously, stay the fuck away from pie charts. And for the love of god, if you have to use one, use only one. I’m guilty of this very transgression and I’m in the process of switching all my pie charts to something else because pie charts are really, really, really useless, almost all of the time. The main things people like about pie charts are:
- They are circles, and everyone loves a circle. Circular things look like important things. This is not enough of a reason to use one.
- They can contain artfully segmented pieces inside of them, and designers like to break things up into segments. This is a valuable skill, but it’s being misused when it’s a pie chart.
- We like to shove too many things into a pie chart. If you have more than about 5 slices, use something else. If the things in the pie chart are not part of a whole that equal 100%, do not use a pie chart.
- We like the look of a lot of pie charts on one page together, but one pie chart is completely incomparable to another one. Humans just can’t perceive the differences between circles, whether they’re sized differently or include differently segmented pies, we simply can’t detect the differences between similar items very well. Bars work so much better.
