It shows the spiral, sure, and it does attract attention. But it’s hard to look at the spiral and say international trade dropped by 2/3 between 1929 and 1933. The radial arrangement does not give an effective baseline. The last two charts above make it easier to see the relative change.

The web plot nicely and immediately communicates the salient information, vis:

That trade in every month in every year from 1929 was lower than a year earlier – captured perfectly by the (rough) concentric circles of diminishing radius.

Those complaining just seem to be graphics snobs.

“Graphic for the Sake of a Caption”

That’s exactly what I thought when I saw the chart, but I wasn’t able to frame it anywhere near as eloquently. Too busy building 57 varieties of this chart (and only three made the cut).

I too had seen that chart in the Economist. Before I discovered your blog post about it, I wrote one for Tableau Software’s blog. Yours is more detailed so I’ve linked back to your post in my post.

Best,
Elissa

http://www.tableausoftware.com/blog/viz-police-economist-radial

Just wanted to thank you for the year’s worth of insightful, accurate and always timely information about excel and charting. You are very deserving of the MVP title.

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas.

Bob