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Figure 11-4. Mapping football teams with name and circle
This seems like a missed opportunity, though, because all of the blue circles are the same
shape and color. These symbols have the potential to communicate more information than
just latitude and longitude. Is there a way to make use of this opportunity to either enhance
interest, cognition, or memory?
I could place
Team
on the color shelf, or I could change the Marks type to
Shape
and add
Team
to the Shape shelf, as shown in
Figure 11-5
.
I'm not a big fan of either one of these. In the first case, Tableau automatically mapped 20
different colors to the 32 different teams, meaning that some teams got the same colors, like
the Carolina and Pittsburgh teams (both are green). There is no reason for these two teams to
be linked in this way; they simply got assigned the same color due to their position in the al-
phabetically sorted list of names.
It's even worse with the shapes: the 32 teams got assigned one of 10 default shapes, meaning
there are groups of three teams that arbitrarily share the same shape. While I could edit the
colors or shapes to give each team a unique assignment, I don't see how this would commu-
nicate anything more effectively than the circle map in
Figure 11-4
.
