Chapter 1 of 10All chapters
Chapter 1 of 10
Axis tricks
The most common distortion.
Truncated baselines
A bar chart starting above zero exaggerates differences, because the bar length no longer represents the value. A 2 percent difference can be drawn to look like a doubling.
- Bars must start at zero; lines may be truncated if labelled.
- Check the axis numbers before reading the shape.
Inverted and uneven axes
Inverting an axis reverses the visual story, and unequal spacing between labels stretches or compresses parts of the range. Both have appeared in mainstream news graphics.