ABSTRACT
The principles are mostly based on research related to how humans detect patterns and make visual comparisons. There are several approaches at the people disposal including position, aligned lengths, angles, area, brightness, and color hue. In general, when displaying quantities, position and length are preferred over angles and/or area. Brightness and color are even harder to quantify than angles. Judging by the area of the circles, the US appears to have an economy over five times larger than China’s and over 30 times larger than France’s. The average of each group is represented by the top of each bar and the antennae extend out from the average to the average plus two standard errors. Since there are so many points, it is more effective to show distributions rather than individual points. The combination of an incorrectly chosen barplot and a failure to use a log transformation when one is merited can be particularly distorting.
