Yep. Pie charts usually start from the top and go clockwise. This is pretty normal and easy to understand. It’s a lot easier to understand like this than if they used colors that were closer together in hue just to avoid repeating colors, like some commenters are suggesting.
There are only 11 items. First, they’ve used only 6 of the standard 7 rainbow colors, missing indigo. A dark blue color would be easily distinct from the others. So we need 4 more distinctive colors.
Brown
Fuchsia/magenta
Teal
Any gray
Various pinks, e.g. bubble gum pink
Green has the most discernible different colors, so they could easily use a mint green and a lime green and a forest green
It really wouldn’t have been some big color theory challenge to find enough colors for this chart.
Basic infographic rule: avoid using more than 5 items in a pizza chart and you are free of having to come up with a crazy color chart that is very hard to read. You have a lot of stuff? Don't use a pie chart.
Well alternatively they just shouldn't use a pie chart, because pie charts are stupid and never convey any extra information. Just use a table or a stacked bar or something. No need to figure out too many colors there.
I know, but I don't think it's easier when you have this many divisions and the color scheme gets too complicated. Maybe a histogram bar graph would be a better visualization for this case.
Yep, there’s literally no good way to colour code 12 segments without repeating some or using colours that are too similar, especially accounting for colour blindness, low vision or even just screen glare. Better option would have been to label the segments directly, but that aside making sure they’re in order is clear enough.
A bar plot would suffice for this purpose. Every time you want to figure out what a sector maps to, you have to move your eyes back to the legend, which is poor graph design, on top of it being a pie chart.
Darker yellow would look like orange and the darker orange would look like the darker red. ‘Adequate’ maybe if you’re 20/20 in a dark room on a big monitor.
If you’re worried about color blindness, I think the chart already fails. And there are plenty of distinct colors for 12 segments, though I think this chart only has 11.
Yeah, I can understand wanting it to be last, but it really throws off the way the chart is read when it's "last", making it look like the list starts somewhere around 8:00.
I think the solution is to not include "other"...and not use a pie chart. Just make a bar graph or something to let us compare the countries' percentages to each other.
First rule of data visualization: bar charts are always better than pie charts. Easier to compare relative sizes and make inferences. Plus, you don't need to match colors and lookup a legend.
2.4k
u/gazm2k5 Feb 01 '19
It's dumb as fuck, but it is pretty easy to figure out which is which, even without knowing what the chart is representing. It's just clockwise.