Makeover Monday 2024 Week 13—The Life of Raw Materials in Amsterdam Walkthrough
Makeover Monday is a weekly project where participants improve how they visualize and analyze data — one chart at a time.
Here’s my thought process working through this week’s challenge.
The original chart
My thoughts on the chart:
- I find it compelling to look at, it’s interesting following the arrows from circle to circle
- It takes me a lot of time to decipher.
- I find the dot grid background distracting, and some of the labels are so low contrast that I find them really tough to read against the colored circles. I like the colors though.
It’s an interesting infographic, but I wonder if I could make a chart that’s quicker to read and more compact.
Making over the chart in Tableau
Since this infographic is showing the flow of materials, I think a Sankey would work well. Looking at the dataset provided in the link, I can map out the following:
This doesn’t have all the data points shown in the original infographic, so I’m going to draw what I see from the graphic itself. With that, I come up with this:
To make a sankey, I’m going to use Tristan’s generator: https://www.ladataviz.com/tools/advviz/sankey
Loading up my data into the tool, and playing around with padding and sizing I end up with this:
At this point I notice that the flow out from the second stage doesn’t add up, but they’re the same as the original infographic. So there must be a missing category of where some of those processed raw materials go. Since my goal is to just makeover the original, I’ll make a note to call this out on my chart.
I’ll keep similar colors to the original, because I like them and don’t feel like coming up with a new 10 color palette.
With some formatting and labels, here’s the final product:
Try your hand at this or other challenges by heading to https://makeovermonday.co.uk/
