I found this graph from EuroStat a few days ago and started playing around with it. You can find the original data and reports here. I put a remake on Twitter and folks were chiming in left and right, so I’m posting it here so others can take a pass.
To sum up, I’m not a fan of this graph (which groups like Eurostat, UNESCO, and the UN routinely make) for 4 primary reasons:
1. Stacking 2014 and 2015. As far as I can tell from the text, this is not a cumulative measure (though they are clearly correlated.)
2. Rotated x-axis labels are hard to read (though I do like the little flag icons), so I would rotate the whole thing.
3. The legend is far away from the data. It could be better integrated with the graph itself, as I tried to do in my remake.
4. I don’t like the mixed encodings (columns and circles) for the different variables. I find it hard to read.
I think this dot plot does a better job of showing the data and linking these parts together. But you may have thoughts about changing the line color or label color/boldness.
Anyways, here’s my original file with labels and whatnot. I created it on Excel 2013 on my PC parallel, so if the labels don’t show up for you, that’s probably why.
I’ve iterated slightly on your design, Jon, since I wanted to (a) take on the challenge to see if I could build it myself and (b) resolve the matter of further encoding to account for those countries who had already met the target by 2015.
Changes I made:
1) the horizontal bar only stretches between the 2004 and 2015 values. I felt it would help to demonstrate how far each nation had come in that 11 year period, without continuing on to the target value.
2) the horizontal bar is encoded to a darker grey if the target has been met
3) the name of the nation is also encoded in a darker colour where the target has been met. I hope the lighter grey is still legible, though…
4) I ordered the nations according to their 2015 value, in ascending order. I don’t have a good reason as to why, it just felt like it flowed more logically going from top left to bottom right.
It’s built in Tableau, and can be downloaded from Tableau Public here:
https://public.tableau.com/profile/mtedw#!/vizhome/EURenewableEnergyShare/RenewableEnergyinEurope
I’ll also aim to blog about it at http://www.pointsofviz.com soon!
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