Cosmetic surgery

In this post, I’ll consider the visual aspects of the scatter plot previously featured here (link).The data concerns cities as units, and as discussed previously, the analytical road is perplexing when the prevailing question concerns people, not subgroups of people known as cities. This scatter plot is one of those charts that repel. My eyes want to look away. The reason is sensory overload. The deeper cause is the lack of hierarchy.Let’s decompose the layers using the visual cues present in the chart.Layer 1 (red font): the four income-age subgroups [see prior post for why this quadrant labeling is confusing in an analytical way]Layer 2 (large bold black font): the chart titleLayer 3 (smaller regular black font): city labels and axis labelsLayer 4 (even smaller, dark gray font): bubble size legend on the top rightLayer 5 (smaller light gray font): axis titlesLayer 6 (smallest light gray font): footnote at the bottom leftLayer 7 (guiding lines): every bubble has a line linking it to…