USA Today’s tax infographic

The excellent infographics blog Visualizing Economics featured this interactive infographic from the USA Today last weekend. It’s an overview of U.S. incomes and income-tax rates since 1940. You enter an income and year; it shows you the corresponding (inflation-adjusted) income and tax burden for each year in the series, as well as what the taxes were spent on (Medicare, national defence, etc.). It’s a good example of the work established media like USA Today have doing on the web over last few years.

I like several things about it:

Colours in infographics

Sometimes a small change makes big difference in how an infographic communicates.

Colour choices, for example. This line graph from the London Times is in many ways a good one: it presents interesting data in support of a provocative thesis. The problem lies in the muted colour coding. As several readers complained, several of the categories are too hard to tell apart, which tends to lose the authors’ point.