Personally, I don't think the graphic from Luca was effective.
I still can't understand the "ink blots".
For example, the transparency makes more colors on the chart than in the legend which confused me from the start. Also the long lines from each state to each data point are difficult to follow.
Try to see for example the overall poverty rate for Louisiana. ??
OK so maybe the intent was to highlight a single conclusion, rather than use the chart to look at other points. So I can overlook my objection above.
But even so, I would have missed the conclusion without the text in the lower right corner of the contextualization.
So for me this is not effective. If you wish to highlight a single conclusion, the text does it better than any of the graphical elements. If you want to use the graphical elements to understand more than one point, it is too hard.
To me it tried to be a bit of both and succeeded at neither.
If this was for mass consumption in a newspaper for example, I think a better way to demonstrate the conclusion in a graphic would be to simply show:
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District Of Columbia compared to all US states:
Poverty Ranking = #2 (%people in poverty)
Wealth Ranking = #1 (GDP per capita)
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Those two facts alone convey the conclusion better than the ink blots chart I think, and ranking is a term everyone understands.
Of course, someone from somewhere other than DC reading that might wonder "how does my state compare". Then you need to show all the states. In that case I think two columns would work better. First column ranks by poverty. Second ranks by wealth. Then draw lines to connect the same state in each column. Steep lines will show the disparity. It would be much simpler.
Just my opinion, I don't mean to sound like a harsh critic. Respectfully submitted comment!! Well done to everyone, I enjoyed looking at them all.
