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You don’t know how many versions of the graph from yesterday’s post I created before settling on the image that made its way into the final draft. The problem was one of data range.

Here’s what I settled on in the end:

The trick was showing a definite change in employment rates while not distorting the changes to make them seem overly dramatic the way Media Matters did when they presented their own alternative which set the baseline close to 8.5 and the high end at 9.3. That creates a very dramatic shift in figures moving by tenths of percents.

I’m not a fan of this result because of the over-accentuated changes from pint value to point value. I might point out that this is very close to Keynote’s automatic formatting for the data.

My fist instinct when creating an alternate graph was to put it on a zero to ten scale.

The end result demonstrates little in the way of progress, and it also creates a very pessimistic view of the data – as if that ten percent mark denotes the end of all employment in the United States. This visual looks like it’s trying to push an ideological narrative.

For fun, then, I set the data range from zero to one hundred. After all, since employment figures are stated as percents, they’re being measured against a hundred-point scale.

Again, change is all but invisible, and this graph makes our unemployment problem seem very insignificant indeed. It looks slanted to me despite being completely accurate.

What I finally settled on was the same eight to ten range the original Fox News infographic used (only with all the data points in the right place). It shows a definite change in data without painting a picture that it either too optimistic or too pessimistic. It creates contrast without exaggeration.

Even when creating a simple graph, be thoughtful. Don’t rely on the default, but present the data in a way that is clear but does not intentionally distort or exaggerate the data.

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