Friend of mine, friend of the blog and genuine good guy Jeffrey Shaffer sent me a link to this Tweet for today's Makeover Monday:


What a mess! Some quick thoughts:

1. It's a pie chart
2. Way too many slices
3. Doesn't start at 12 o'clock
4. Too much precision on the numbers
5. Too many colors (see #2 above)
6. The category names are too long

The changes I've made:

1. Changed the chart type to a bar chart
2. Displayed the top 5 and then everything else is grouped together and ranked last
3. One decimal place on the numbers is plenty; no decimals would work fine too
4. Colored "All Other" differently so that it would be more noticeable that it's not a single item
5. Shortened the category names

If you're an Instagram user, you likely noticed last week the message on the app indicating the sweeping cleanup of spam accounts that was coming. The cleanup took place late last week and shortly after I saw this donut chart from Zach Allia.

Click on the image below to go to the interactive version.


Holy cow! What an overwhelming mess! So what's wrong?

1. It's a donut chart, which is a terrible way to display ranking relationships.
2. When you change the metric, the sorting gets lost.
3. There are way, way, way too many colors.
4. It's impossible to make any sense of this.

My dislike for the pie chart is well documented. Yesterday morning, Tableau Zen Master Matt Francis sent me this gif of a pie chart makeover.

Courtesy Darkhorse Analytics

At the same time, I was reading an article by Business Insider about how people spend time on their smartphones. The article contained this pie chart:


Here are some of the problems with this chart:

• It's a pie chart.
• Each slice is labeled with the category and the amount. Why not just make it a table if you're going to do that?
• There's no apparent order to the slices. At least sort the slices in descending order starting at 12 o'clock.
• In the article, they emphasize the top 3 categories, but they don't emphasize them in the pie chart.

I entered the data into infogr.am and created this simple bar chart instead:

As a follow up to my post about how rich the University of Alabama football team is, I wanted to show a quick overview of the top 10 richest teams. Note that, despite making $47.1M in revenue in the 2012-2013 season, Alabama only ranks 6th.

The data comes from smartycents.com. I would encourage you to read their article if you're curious to know where all of this money comes from. It's pretty fascinating just how big of a business college football has become.

Initially, I was going to create the viz for this post in Tableau, but I was reading the Interactive Inspiration article on Visualoop and saw this ad for infogr.am:


The ad reminded me of Datawrapper, so I thought I would give it a try. I must say I was super impressive with infogram's simplicity. In just a couple of minutes, I registered for an account and had this nice interactive chart.
There are three things I wish I could do with infogram that I can't out of the box:

1. Auto-sort the bars based on the metric selected 
2. Color the bars by a dimension, conference in this case; This would allow me to highlight that 5 of the top 10 teams are in the SEC. 
3. Hide the axis; I don't need it on this view since I'm labeling the bars directly.

My advice: Keep your eyes open and continue to try new tools.  It's fun to learn new things!