Edward Tufte would condemn this chart of the Monaco GP track
Posted by: Michael Slater in Design
Published in the Straits Times
This chart muffles the information on turns almost as effectively as the fonts cigarette makers use to smother the Surgeon General’s warnings.
The Colors convey no information. The rectangles convey no information. You must read all the squares of numbers before you understand anything about the speed and cornering of the map. It’s scarcely better than a table of numbers. At least a table wouldn’t have skipped some of the turns for space reasons.
You could come up with a dozen better ways to present the data. For instance the examples below, of turns 2 and 3. One is a mild turn at high speed, and the second is a sharp turn at modest speed. The super-imposed numbers are almost an uncessary afterthought. Now you can quickly see the sharpest corners, the fastest corners, maximum RPM corners, etc. All the context is in a single cell itself. You don’t need to have scanned all the turns and identify max/min of gearings, g-force, and speed to understand the context of an individual cell.
Fastest corner on the track
Most punishing corner on the track
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