Posted by I’ll be honest, I did not see this one coming… whiskey???
But hey, it’s a great dataset, nice and simple, and the three best vizzes win a bottle of whiskey. So let’s go from there…
The original visualization comes from Bloomberg and is a simple line chart showing the growth in Irish whiskey sales between 2011 and 2016 by region.
What works well:
- Simple line chart
- Grid lines for 50% and 100% provide reference points
- The colors are very distinct and can be differentiated easily by people without color vision deficiencies
- Subtitle explains what the lines represent
- Color legend is very prominent
What could be improved:
- The title doesn’t appear to have much to do with the viz, its meaning doesn’t come out clearly from the chart and it has a different (casual) tone compared to the rest of the article
- Using green and red in the same color palette is problematic for people with color blindness but also because green and red are commonly associated with good versus bad results
- How are the countries ordered in the color palette? It looks to be in descending order by volume growth, but maybe a geographical sorting or alphabetical would make more sense?
- Why are the year labels not showing for every single year? The labels that are there make it look like 2013 and 2015 were forgotten by the author
What I did:
- A simple line chart to highlight the massive growth in sales to the US
- Keeping all other countries in the view for context
- I have an idea for another viz on this dataset, so will hopefully find time to execute it 🙂
