An awful diagram

Another example of a terrible diagram.

Chocolate Pie Chart

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my arguments against pie charts. However, I have finally found a legitimate use for pie charts - homemade chocolate! A company called Chocolate Editions has been reviewed in Wallpaper magazine for creating a chocolate pie chart. The result is 70% dark, 20% milk and 10% white chocolate. The percentages are reflected in the shape of the pie chart.

Doughnut pie chart madness

The Sydney Morning Herald ran an article on Australian eating habits on 30 July 2011. In an act of pie chart madness they felt the need to use the following pie chart:

Compounding the problem they used a terrible chequer board background.

Pie Chart fun

Here is an example of using pie charts for fun.

Label your Axes

Good practice for creating graphs is to label the x and y axes (and any other dimensions). Without good labels the reader is left guessing the meaning of your graph. A comical version of this is provided by GraphJam who provide the following:

Pie charts can make you laugh

One of my favourite bloggers is Jessica Hagy. Each day she publishes an index card with a comical graph. Most pie charts are terrible but this one about "I'm fine." amused me.

Getting creative with Pie Charts

The Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) is a very successful organisation with an operating revenue of over $538 Million. However their success does not stop them creating strange pie charts. The following diagram is from page 35 of the ASX 2009 annual report.

The pie chart represents the number of referrals from the ASX to the Australian corporate regulator for possible breaches to trading laws or rules. The interesting innovation is the 'Total Referrals 88' which is the outer circle of the pie chart. Initially I thought this must represent the sum of the slices of the pie but the slices add up to more than 88. Then I spotted the asterisk indicating a single referral may contain more than one breach.

This pie chart should win an award for visual confusion. The total referrals number visually looks like it should equal the sum of the slices but it actually represents a very different number.