Comment from Mathias
Time: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 1:25 am

Amazing how people get out of their way to create ever-more fancy looking and unreadable charts, where the good old bar chart tells the truth, all the truth and nothing but the truth so effectively… As a member of the color-blind tribe, I can tell you that there is no way I can get the story behind the cube without effort – but spotting the peaks and valleys (if this is an adequate way to describe it, given the horizontal layout!) in a bar chart is a breeze.

Comment from Chandoo
Time: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 4:47 am

Cubicle square pie chart.. .gosh, I cant imagine the reason why some one would even think of making this. If only people are made to buy carbon credits to make chart pollution…

Thanks for the wonderful advice Jon.

Comment from jeff weir
Time: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 11:22 pm

C’mon guys…EVERYTHING is going 3D these days. Hell, down here in New Zealand we even have a 3D newspaper – check out http://www.3news.co.nz/3D-newspaper-pops-up-in-Taranaki-/tabid/421/articleID/126158/cat/52/Default.aspx

And as with newspapers, if I print these charts out they are perfect for wrapping my 3D fish and chips up with.

Pingback from Dashboard Best Practice – Google Analytics Intelligence Report | Pointy Haired Dilbert: Charting & Excel Tips – Chandoo.org
Time: Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 5:32 am

[...] basic charts – Often we fancy ourselves to use some super-complicated-chart. Heck, Jon reviewed (more like lambasted) a 3d Square Pie Chart just yesterday. See how Google has used simple line and column charts to make the point. It is the [...]

Comment from gerdami
Time: Wednesday, November 4, 2009, 8:20 am

Dear Jon,
I am currently visiting your blog with a laptop and screen width of 1024px, which is certainly not unusual amongst your subscribers. Your blog then displays a non-user friendly horizontal scrollbar.

Thanks to FireFox’s firebug plugin, I noticed within the associated CSS file that the width of your “div” named “wrap” was set to 1060px.

#wrap {
background-color:#FFFFFF;
color:#333333;
margin:0 auto;
width:1060px;
}

Please lower width to 1010px and it will fit perfectly on laptops like mine.

Comment from DaleW
Time: Saturday, November 7, 2009, 6:52 pm

At the risk of being considered contrarian, I feel that this, well — Rubik’s cube tribute chart — is a perfect chart for this data.

It would be a tragedy if good and meaningful data were lost in a chart like this.

However, it’s more of a comedy when such soft, feel-good data from a self-serving opinion survey is presented in such pretty but puzzling form. This chart format really is inherently more interesting than the results being presented here.

Consider: by a 7:2 margin, these nonrandom respondents for the world admit to placing a higher rather than lower priority on climate change than the general public. What next? A survey of largely Microsoft employees to see if they believe Vista users should switch to Windows 7 instead of Snow Leopard?

No tough questions were presented in that chart. No “will you support Greenhouse gas regulations even if they triple your electricity and petrol expenses and send more jobs overseas?” No mention of nuclear power, just currently much less large scale cost effective wind and solar power . [Disclaimer -- I considered Penn & Teller's show on nuclear power as a green alternative both entertaining and informative, while I found this chart mostly just entertaining. Informative only in the sense of learning about worst practices in charting, as I believe Jon intended.]