You know what makes me mad? Lousy design.

Take the Atlantic’s latest missive on how it’s unfair to incarcerate like half of the population of the City of New Orleans. Important issue, no doubt, and maybe it’s just me, but hiring a new graphic designer might make a bit more sympathetic to the cause. Without cheating, see if you can make sense of this map. Don’t throw stones if you live in a glass house and all that, but screw it, I need to rant once in awhile.

• Spatial data should almost always be normalized by population. As the article points out, this makes the info for the Ninth Ward look janky. So fix it. Not that hard.
• If you don’t have anything to say, don’t say it, even if you get to use a neat looking graphic. Look at the little person icon in each block. Now count how many blocks have more than one. Not helpful. Like pie charts. Or bar charts with two data points.
• You can’t read the legend. Or a good portion of the data labels. Again, easy to fix.
• The other images on the site are low-res. Actually, I’m kind of impressed – normally people upload images that are way too big. But really, don’t flaunt if if you just don’t got it.
• The callout on the right doesn’t help anyone understand the map’s spatial context. How many people out there know that Central City is shaped kind of like a slice of pizza? How many people care? Show of hands?

Seriously, though, it’s kind of an interesting article. Read it. Oh, and thanks to Dug for finding this for me.