Designing with a Purpose - Data Points: Visualization That Means Something - page 331

FIGurE 9-3 Tweets during the inauguration of President Barack Obama
You don't have to write an essay to accompany every graphic, but a title
and a little bit of explanation via a lead-in are always helpful. It's often
good to include a link somewhere on your graphic so that people can still
find your words even if the graphic is shared on another site. Otherwise, it
can quickly become like a game of Telephone, and before you know it, the
graphic you carefully designed is explained with the opposite meaning you
intended. The web is weird like that.
As another example, the graphic in Figure 9-4 is a simple timeline that
shows the top ten data breaches at the time.
It's basic with only ten data points, but when I posted it on FlowingData, I
brought up how the breaches grow higher in frequency as you move from
2000 to 2008. The graphic ended up getting shared quite a bit, with a vari-
ant even ending up in Forbes magazine. Almost everyone brought up that
last bit. I don't think people would've given the graphic much thought had I
not provided that simple observation.