Here’s the thing I love most about visual communication: there’s always room for improvement. As soon as you think a graph or data visualization is finished and perfect, someone else will come along with an idea to make it even better. Take, for example, the excellent series of blogposts “The little of visualization design” by (the amazing) Andy Kirk. How a minor detail can make a visualization so much more awesome!

If you have 15 minutes of spare time, I strongly encourage you to watch the following video, because it’s the perfect example of improving visualizations for dummies, and a great intro for this blog post: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IB7crD_paKQ

Summary: Alan Smith, Data Visualization Editor at the Financial Times, shows some great examples of converting ‘meh’ graphs from press releases to awesome visualizations that really tell a story. He also organizes crash courses to teach his fellow journalists how to do this in order to become more ‘data critical’.

In this blogpost, I’d like to do the same for a graph I encountered in my Twitter timeline a few days ago. To come straight to the point, here’s the graph we’ll redesign:

The graph is taken from a (publicly available) research paper on predicting depression from Instagram pictures. In short, the filter you use to prettify your Instagram pictures tells something about how you feel. Okay, to be more precise, there appears to be a correlation between the usage of certain filters and the mental health state of an Instagram user. You can see that in the graph above, but it’s not very clear. Let’s improve that!

I’ve always learned that horizontal words are easier to read than vertical words. So, let’s turn all those words 90° to improve readability. In fact, why not rotate the entire graph? There’s no real added value in the current orientation.

Hey, this just saved us from some serious neck injuries!