CSS3 Combo chart

I abhor pie charts. They can be misleading, they're ugly, and research from Bell Labs indicates that comparisons by angle are harder to gauge than comparisons by length. Joyce Robbins, Ph.D., of Bell Labs advises that pie charts "do not communicate data well and should be used rarely."^[1] I think that they should probably never be used at all.

Anyway, these horizontal combo charts may not be a much better display of data, but they're built completely in CSS3, they use length to present comparisons, and they aren't as gimmicky as pie charts. Mark Turner and I created these for the new platform at G5.

These combo charts are easy to use and they're free. Download them from Github.

¹ Joyce Robbins, Ph.D., and Naomi B. Robbins, Ph.D (2010). Quantitative Literacy Across the Curriculum: Improving Graphs in College Textbooks (p. 1). ↩

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