Makeover Monday 2024 Week 4 - Highest Paid Athletes 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 for working through this week’s challenge.

The original chart

• Forbes table design is very clean — it’s easy to read. But I don’t get any insight from it — nothing sticks out. I’d like something to stick out about the data
• Searching by name I think is useful if you’re a sports fan — for the casual viewer I don’t think it adds much
• I think it’s interesting to see on field vs off field earnings broken out. I wish there was a way to sort though!

Making over the chart in Tableau

I want to change the table into a visual — I’m most curious about the two metrics, on and off field earnings, so I’ll try a scatterplot.

I like the chart, but colored by sport nothing sticks out to me. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious clusters — and picking a palette with 8 colors that look distinct is going to be difficult.

What about on field vs off field earnings? what if I color on that?

Adding that to the color shelf —

I like that better.

Now, here is the point where I thought about adding more charts — bar charts showing total, off and on field earnings for each athlete, a sport selector, but I’m trying to limit how much time I spend on this makeover so I’ll call it good with one chart.

I’ll use huemint to come up with some colors, add some formatting, and here’s the final version:

You can view the final viz on Tableau Public here: https://public.tableau.com/views/OnvsOff-FieldAthleteEarnings/OffandOnFieldAthleteEarnings?:language=en-US&:display_count=n&:origin=viz_share_link