What could be improved?

• The axis is truncated; this is a big no-no for a bar chart.
• The labels for the countries don't need to be rotated on a diagonal.

What I did

• A bar chart is the easiest way to communicate, so I've kept that.
• I rotated the bars to make them horizontal.
• I save space by labeling the inside of the bars with the country name.
• I labeled the ends of the bars so that I wouldn't need an axis.
• I highlighted the EU countries, since I found that an interesting piece of the analysis.
• I created the viz as a mobile size, since I thought this was as good of an opportunity as any to practice mobile design.

Thoughts?

• It's a simple line chart, which makes it easy to understand.
• The red line stands out well against the white background without being too bright.
• The units on the axis are labeled.
• The title tells is what the line represents.

• The subtitle could be moved to a caption below the image.
• The axis has a strange scale. Why does it start at 180?
• Adding the drop lines makes it look like the length of those lines is important, but if you compare the length of the lines, then that could be misleading due to the axis starting at 180. I'd remove those lines.
• The year labels are diagonal.
• Each year doesn't need a label.
• Why doesn't the source document contain data for all of the years?

• It's Easter and I have basically no time to work on this, so do something quick.
• Mimic what we created for Workout Wednesday week 33.
• Focus on the relative change from a chosen period instead of the absolute change. For me, this is more meaningful if you want to see how much a country has changed and it normalizes all of the countries.

That's it. All done!

• Overall the design is clean, including minimal gridlines.
• Showing cumulative growth since 2011 makes it easy to compare the regions.
• The region colors are easy to distinguish from one another.
• The subtitle tells me what the chart is about.
• The legend is prominently placed so that we know it's important.
• Putting the axis on the right speed processing because the axis is next to the end of the lines.

• Labeling the lines directly would remove the need for the legend.
• Labeling the ends of the lines would tell us what the growth actually has been.
• The title isn't very relevant to the data. Why does this make the Irish lucky? A better title is needed.
• So what? What are we supposed to get from this?

• There are a lot of countries and a lot more years in the data set, explore them and look for stories.
• Consider the regional aggregations to see if there's an significance.
• Look at both volume and change. Looking at just change doesn't factor in the volume that each country imports.
• This is time series data, so spend time looking at line charts.

• Simple title that tells me what the viz is about
• Subtitle that provides context for the numbers
• Side-by-side bars are a good way of comparing values year-over-year
• Overall clean layout
• Nice fat bars to make comparisons easier
• Colors are distinct enough

What could be improved?

• Include a % symbol on the axis somewhere
• This is a very narrow view of the data, whereas there are many more years available and it's also available by gender.
• It's a pretty boring viz; one that you'll often skim by and not engaged with.
• Label the bars

I drew inspiration from this European IronViz entry by Ravi Mistry. I like how he is showing the change since the beginning.

Unlike Ravi, though, I decide to only label the line for all persons. I made this decision because labeling the end of each line would have made the viz feel crowded, as the numbers are varying enough to provide room to breathe.

I wanted to test out the Inconsolata font that Nathan Yau uses for his charts over on Flowing Data. If you have it installed on your computer, you'll see my intended display. If not, Tableau Public will server up something, not sure what really.

Lastly, the colors. I picked them from the ONS dashboard about the UK economy.

Click on the image below for the interactive version.

The chart itself has its own set of problems:

1. It's too dark overall. The dark red bars and dark bottles are hard to see against the blue background.
2. The flags are unnecessary. What value do they add?
3. The bottles are cute, but unnecessary decoration.
4. The legend is in reverse order.
5. Do the bottle extend beyond the bars or do they start from the same baseline?
6. It has a weak title. What's the story?

This is chart junk at its best. Don't create charts like this. I went to the OECD website and downloaded the data. Below I present ten alternative charts that all work better than the original. You can download the Tableau workbook with all of these charts here.