My entry for the Best Worst Viz competition

Number of tweets with hashtag #BestWorstViz, per date of the month April 2016 and time of the day. Times are UTC, 18 April is the deadline. Data updates every hour; clear browser history to refresh. Entry for Best Worst Viz competition, created by dirkmjk.

I love to hate bad graphs (who doesn’t), and I think Andy Kirk’s idea to organise a Best Worst Viz competition is quite brilliant. As he explains, there’s something fair about creating your own bad graph rather than criticising somebody else’s:

[..] picking on bad visualisation involves work by other people who we might never meet or have a chance to learn about what the true circumstances and intent of a project were. The essence of this challenge is based on your best worst visualisation - the best worst visualisation you can possibly make.

I had to give it a try. But how? An exploding 3D pie chart, truncated y-axis, out-of-control spaghetti chart - it all seemed a bit too obvious. I aimed for something different, drawing inspiration from the blink element of the early days of web design. The shifting colours of the stacked bar chart pointlessly illustrate the direction of time - or whatever. I think it’s pretty bad.

Standalone version of graph here.