Can Death Be Too Designed?

On Wired’s Underwire blog, Sonia Zjawinski says yes, the New York Times Op-Ed has “overdesigned” its latest visualization of 2,592 soldiers killed in Iraq. She equates the latest chart, published this week, to this Groovisions illustration:

While I fully support the idea of creatively charting numbers that are sometimes hard to grasp or visualize, this chart loses its power in its overly designed nature.

That may have been the designer’s intent, she concedes, but in the comments an astute observer accuses Wired of the same thing:

It’s no worse than some of the graphics displaying stats in Wired.

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