[MUSIC] Welcome to Charts. I'm going to talk about three basic kinds of charts. But first of all, why charts? Well, people have a hard time making sense of numbers and data, and you could just run this page like this. Just a bunch of text and a photo and a lot of publications look like this online, whatever. But you add just a little, little note to it, like a little chart, and it sort of all of a sudden it elevates it a little bit, it becomes informational. So it draws the eye and people they're going to read that. And it's a good entry point into the story too. Even something that small. But basically charts or graphs, a lot of people call them graphs. Charts has become with synonymous for graphs. I know there purists saying no, but you know what? I say charts. So sue me. Go write your congressman. But basically they take data like this. And they turn it into something visual using these symbols that we're all familiar with. This is a proportional pie chart. So charts are just ways of making sense of this data. And in this data, there's actually an error and, I'm going to see if you can find it. I'm not going to spend too long, I'll actually tell you what it is. And it was in Newsweek Magazine. But basically, this data is Martha Stewart, she has cooking shows and all these kinds of things, books on housewares. I don't really follow her too well. It's all about her empire. Where does all her money come from? So here's the pie chart that shows where everything comes from. And there's an error in here. I'll give you ten seconds. 1001, 1002, okay, time up. It's missing the other category. A pie chart should always add to a 100%. And this has 27, 26, 9 and one. Doesn't even come close to 100%. It's showing the major components of her publishing empire, but it should have another category to it, because it's not all of where she makes her money. It's just the major components. And basically this is a very relevant pie chart if it were right. As is, looking the way it is, with the headline and explaining what this is. But we decided that we wanted to anchor two pages in the magazine with it. So, well, it's Martha Stewart who is about food and pastries and pies. And so for the first and only time in my career, I made a pie chart out of pies. And we went to the local bakery, and we bought some pies, we had a lot pie that day of News Week. We basically printed out the pie chart, the size of the pie on a printer, and put it over the top of the pie, and cut right through it with a knife to get the slices. And wound up cleaning it up and Photoshop a lot and this is what we wound up with. So, you can see we're missing the other category. At least it's not completely wrong in the sense that it's still showing the major components of her empire. So the magazines there, we just bought from a local magazine stand and scanned them. This was all put together in After Effects, which was the predecessor of InDesign from another company that everybody used at the time. And the chair we got from her publicist because whatever we found online was not high resolution enough. We needed to a higher res image. And all the other images, the photos of Martha with the baking pan and the files all came from the web. So what are the components of a graph? Well I love a headline and a sub head that explains what the graph is about. A lot of people just stick the graph up there and say you figure it out. Here's some numbers. Good luck. On, off. Headline and little explains it to them. Everybody feels smarter. Remember graphics should make you feel smarter. But these are the components, a headline, a sub head. You can go ahead and pause here and read through these and see what they are. I'm going to be talking about three basic kinds of charts that are very popular. One is the bar chart that compares categories. As you can see at the bottom here, again, they're different pieces of individual fruit, and so it's comparing them. But with a bar chart you can also compare over time. You can see at the bottom of the bars now there is time. So a bar chart is sort of multi purpose. It also works like a pie chart, where you can show all of the elements of a whole. So a bar chart is very, it's your swiss army utility chart that kind of does a lot of different things. As I said, a pie chart only compares component parts of a whole. As I said with Marth Stewart, such as everything 100% of something, you don't always have to put percentages on there. You can actually put the whole number. Like on the Martha Stewart chart, I could've actually put millions of dollars. You know how many millions of dollars she gets along with the percentages or I could've just left the millions of dollars. How many millions she gets from each one of these parts of her company. And a lie chart shows things over time, you see how it flows like that. Whatever you do, do not put individual categories at the bottom. Like apples, pears, grapes. Don't do that. That's for the bar chart. You always want to have dates or times of some sort of flow on the bottom of a line chart. A little bit about type on charts. You want them all to be the same and all the charts across whatever you're doing. Use the same type size and style. In the case of these, I've actually created the same little block of text for each one of these with a little bold lead-in. The bold lead-in just makes it scannable, so you could put a very descriptive word there that will keep people from having to read the rest of the text maybe. In the case of the scales here, they're the same exact font size. Same with the bottoms, same font size across the whole bottom. They're smaller than the other fonts around, and that's okay. So long as they're legible on the platform you're using. And when you package this things together, you want to make sure they all kind of look alike and go together. Like in this case, a student made this there using similar colors, similar fonts is a little. A few things I clean up at here, like the red type and the pie chart. But other than that, this looks pretty good compared to, say this one, where it's kind of chaos. There's no real structure and order to it. Things are too deep. The bar chart and the line chart should have been squished up to be the same depth as the pie chart, so it'd look more like this one. There's not a lot of design. You could print out this document and it'll help you remember what each one of these charts does. [MUSIC]