OpinionNewspapers & magazines
Siobhain Butterworth
The readers' editor on ... wiggly lines and axes for beginners
Sun 30 Nov 2008 19.01 EST
The Guardian likes a graph. It is even prepared to send up its own, hence the page of spoof graphics, about the pre-budget report, in the features section last week. It included the "Larry Elliott happiness index", named after the economics editor, which featured rows of androgynous humans (a staple of Guardian graphics showing data about people) and a line graph called "Pink snake of concern". A diagram of overlapping circles (another Guardian graphics favourite), overlaid with random numbers, was headed "Cheeky Cheeky, Touch My Bum". Close readers may have noticed a tiny credit at the end: "Source: Battenberg cake. The look you give me when you sigh like that. The shape your hair makes on the pillow." The subtext of the joke contains the inadvertent criticism that Guardian graphics sometimes leave us none the wiser.
"The Guardian is generally good about representing data," a maths teacher wrote in October. But a line graph headed "Good times and bad: 50 years of boom and bust", which ran across two news pages about the financial crisis, infuriated her. "Lots of impressive pictures and red ink and squiggly lines, and nowhere does anyone trouble to label the Y [vertical] axis," she said. "What the hell are we measuring the boom and bust against?" It was a slip, Michael Robinson, the Guardian's head of graphics, told me. The Y axis was originally labelled "GDP" but that information was accidentally removed when the page was edited.
A similar error occurred in a graph last week that used two lines, one red and one blue, to show changes in inflation over the last two years - without saying what they represented. Only one reader complained; perhaps for others the unidentified lines were a graphic enough illustration of the state we're in. Still, it would have been helpful to tell readers that it was the consumer prices index - the government's target measure - that went down to 4.5% in October and the retail prices index that fell to 4.2%.
Mistakes like this will happen from time to time because of the speed at which graphics are produced every day. A greater source of irritation, for some readers, is the Guardian's practice of suppressing zero on the vertical axes of line graphs used to illustrate changes over relatively short periods. A reader complained last month that graphs showing average house prices and interest rates were misleading. "The trends, though significant in themselves, would look much less dramatic if the graphs were fully drawn," he said. "It should be a matter of course to always show the suppressed zero by means of some sort of break in the vertical scale."
The Guardian could, like the UK Statistics Authority, leave a gap in the vertical scale after zero in line graphs; starting the vertical axis with a squiggly line after zero would do the same job. Robinson acknowledges the practice but the Guardian's style is not to draw in the vertical axes and, from a design point of view, he is reluctant to change that. He wonders, as do I, what more it would tell readers when it is clear that a graph is dealing with changes in the short term.
Robinson, whose team produces 10 to 20 graphics a day for the paper, is an information graphic designer, not a journalist. "Good graphics are simple, clear and uncomplicated," he says. He works closely with specialist news editor Simon Rogers, who was appointed to his news and graphics role in 2005. "A lot of data is available electronically now and it's easily manipulated so it's important that we analyse it journalistically," says Rogers. "We can show people information in a way that they wouldn't see it otherwise."
Rogers is particularly proud of a UK government public spending chart, published in September, which combined good design with strong editorial analysis of data. "Lots of people, including government departments, requested copies of it," he told me. "The government reported the data by department in separate annual reports. We broke down what each department was spending money on and presented the information in an uncluttered, elegant diagram."
reader@theguardian.com