The New York Times has an excellent staff that produces visually
interesting graphics for the general public. However, because
their graphs need to be understood by all Times readers, the
staff sometimes creates a complicated infographic when a simpler
statistical graph would show the data in a clearer manner. A
recent graphic was discussed by Kaiser Fung in his article,
"When Simple Is too Simple." Kaiser argued that the Times made a
poor choice of colors in a graphic (shown at right) that depicts
the proportion of women in certain jobs and how that proportion
has changed between 1980 and 2010. I agree with Kaiser that the
colors should change, and I will discuss colors in a subsequent
blog post. However, I think that the graph itself suffers from
some design problems. First, it is difficult to see overall
trends and relationships in the data. Second, in order to
understand the points on the left side of the graph, you have to
follow a line to the right side of the graph in order to find
the label. Third, th