Edward Tufte is the most brilliant American mind on visual information. He's a design guy with a Ph.D. in political science from Yale, wrote the landmark books on graphics, has shown how the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster may have been caused by a bad PowerPoint presentation, and lives in our home town in Connecticut. Our friend Andy Jukes said once that Edward Tufte writes like the voice of God commenting on the works of humankind.
But we like Tufte best because he coined the term chartjunk.
Chartjunk is all the stuff you see in graphics that distracts you, either sloppily or deliberately, from the real data. The most common use is to present elements slightly out of scale to create a misleading point -- as in the example above, in an airport sign conveying that the vast majority of Americans are in favor of an energy issue. If you really look closely at the piechart, the advocates are a slight majority -- perhaps 57% to 43% -- but the visual heft feels more like 3 to 1.
Advertisers of course do this all the time with other coding, such as photos showing too much sex or copy showing too much joy over products that are really commodities. You could say most humans engage in exaggeration to be more charming at parties or more employable at work. If all language is stretched, the question then is how much is too much -- and if it really is an effective tool in manipulating your audience's reaction.
2 comments:
This is an interesting post. I'm a big Gan of Tufte's - own all four of the books - and I came to his work because (at the time) I was a trial attorney, prosecuting criminal cases. And was trying to learn what I could about how to persuade people to make serious decisions.
My thought about your post is that whether or not it's effective - let's assume it has some minimal positive sales effect. Other viewers who recognize the chart junk as what it is will form an adverse opinion of the advertiser's credibility. (When the jury knows you've lied to them once ....)
So I think the use of chart junk often has other long-term costs.
That is a great point. Unfortunately I think many communicators (especially advertisers) focus on response and often fail to think about the adverse impact of their communications. Annoyance is tough to measure, while responses can be tracked.
It's worth a thought in every campaign, especially those in public awareness, to think about the potential for the message to alienate a portion of the audience, and whether that offsets the gains in influence.
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