I liked the simplicity of ritchielee’s chart. What I didn’t like was the black black background. I found it hard to read the colored lines and text. Especially as one’s eyes age, a white background with dark colors is easiest to read.

It looks pretty striking on a computer monitor. He’s just used yoga, running, and walking; which are probably amoungst the most common forms of exercise available to many. Although it would be more compact if he used half a pizza as in your reworked chart, and as per comments above, may leave some non-chart-savvy people scratching their heads. But hey…that’s exercise.

These exercises are good, because they force you to think about things in a different way, and they give you insights into other people’s though processes.

Similar to your project, I’ve seen scatter plots with distribution histograms on the X and Y axes. Not too much new under the sun, but even something old can provide insight.

Thanks for the challenge – It’s given me a good idea for a project I’m working on now. I’ve currently got a scatterplot that shows where abouts a large number of customers fall on a pricing curve (it compares the prices of hardcopy books with the equivalent cost of subscribing to an online library), but many of the points bunch together near the start of the curve so it’s hard to make out exact numbers of customers there.

Building on the above approach, I’m going to stick an inverted bar chart on the left, that shares the same y axis as my scatterplot. This can then display a frequency tabulation of how many customers fall in each pricing range (i.e how many customers between $0 and $500, how many between $500 and $1000 – basically how many fall within each tick mark on the scatterplot’s y axis). Then – using a second axis on the same bar chart – I can also show how much total revenue comes from each pricing bracket.

So Chartdoctoring has been the mother of invention.

If the aim is to help people work out how much exercise they need to do to burn off the effects of different foods, then we should keep in mind a couple of things concerning presentation of our message:

1. most people eat a large range of foods. I think the bad things are well covered by our ‘menu’ (*groan*) of choices of commonly consumed food items; but it would be good to have some healthy options, so that people could see that eating better is as much an option as exercising more

2. exercise methods or options for the majority of people are likely to be much more limited i.e. most people probably get their exercise from walking, and I’m guessing running comes second. These are options that almost everyone either can do or can relate to doing, and they’re free. But yoga cost money, and skiing requires snow.

So, to use Few’s mantra…simplify, simplify, simplify. Graph the foods, and graph just one exercise method (I’d pick either the amount of fast walking or slow running required to burn off the calories from that food item. It would be great if these had such similar energy requirements that you could denote both things with the one series)

This allows readers to make a simple one-to-one comparison of each food to an exercise medium that most users can relate to and afford.

Then – if you want to – have a seperate conversion table (or simple bar graph) to show a multiplier you’d have to apply for say yoga or cross country skiing or sex (another great exercise – granted, not free for all though) .

I.e. the conversion chart shows that for sex, you should triple the exercise time shown above for fast walking (for lazy lovemakers).