Pizza (Pie) Chart, originally uploaded by densitydesign.

Each election period reminds us that magazines and newspapers are playing a fundamental role in the evolution of infographics as a diffused and common (public) language.

Infographics are more and more used not only to communicate data and information, but also to produce eye-catching, evocative illustrations, to be shown in magazine covers. It happens sometimes that the evocative purpose prevails on the informative one, like in the n.1041 of the “Il Venerdì”, a weekly supplement-magazine of the “La Repubblica”, one of the major italian newspaper. The cover of the magazine is an example of misused infographics: the sum of the percentages is more than 100% (155%), and the dimension of the slices is not properly and directly related to the values.
Then, the subjects of the slices are not homogeneous, so we can’t see them all together as a whole: you can’t compare “the best quality of Italians” with “what makes Italian ashamed”. It seems that magazines and newspapers are not aware of their role in disseminating and cultivating the language, even the visual language of people. We could start a new research line on this field of misused infographics…

Tags: Infographics, Italians, Misused Infographics, pie chart