It's all there, even if you can't see it

Reader Jean-Claude F. flagged the above chart from a German publication on Twitter as a "very, very bad graph design". He has a point. The chart concerns poll results from May 2026 about the upcoming local elections in the Saxony-Anhalt state of Germany. Eight parties are in the running.It was not obvious to me that those black boxes hanging out in the top right corner constitutes a legend. I figured this out after asking GPT to translate the words.They say Poll Result, Party – European Parliment group, and Last Election (Result).In other words, the data are found in the top box while the bottom box carries the column labels.Putting the names of parties inside boxes with the same colors as the columns has the effect of artificially extending these columns by a fixed height. This tactic has the reverse effect as the oft-maligned tactic of not starting columns at zero, thereby kneecapping each column by a fixed height. Either form of distortion is undesirable.One alternative is printing…