Last night I attended the London Data+Women meetup and Emma Cosh gave a fantastic presentation about a project she worked on with Strange Horizons about the change in women reviewers and reviewers in sci-fi magazines. The visualisations she presented worked well because she was there to explain them. On the way home, I got to thinking...would these work well without her explaining what they mean? Maybe, but I think they could be better.

This also got me thinking about the work by Stephanie Evergreen and her focus on effective, impactful titles. I recommend to people that when they are creating visualisations, assume the audience will see a static image. If they can't understand it, then it should be changed.

First, here's the visualisation that Emma created:

Click for the interactive version

There are a few things I would change:

1. Give it a stronger title that explains the visualisation and the key message
2. Only label the lines that are increasing
3. Only show the magazine name on the left label to minimize the text
4. Make the footer legible (brown on black is too hard to read)

If you do nothing else to improve a weak visualization, you’ll still seriously improve its interpretability by giving it an awesome title.

I certainly wouldn't classify Emma's viz as weak, it merely could be more effective.