#TweakThursday: Horizontal vs Vertical Bars

#TweakThursday: From time to time I tweak someone else's public viz and try to make it better to my subjective view.

How does one use horizontal bars and vertical bars? How to order time-based multiples in a trellis chart?

Here are my own rules of thumb:

• Vertical bars are for time-based trends.
• Horizontal bars are for categorical comparison.
• Always place the latest cell in a time-based trellis at the top-left corner where the focus is.

I found that Professor Klaus Schulte's recent MakeoverMonday viz submission is quite interesting. I just tweaked it a bit according to the above rules. Hope it makes the viz a bit more interesting.

Here is my resulting viz. Feel free to download it and explore.

Note that the vertical axis is the bins for the histogram. We easily see France is placed in higher bins than the other 3 highlighted countries recently. Since the most recent is more interesting than the past, placing the the latest cells at the top left corner makes it easier to check.

Had a few exchanges with Klaus in Twitter about my reasoning behind the edit.

This is Professor Klaus Schulte's original viz.