Quick #makeovermonday in Playfair

Andy Kriebel runs a twitter hashtag #makeovermonday where he revises an existing data visualization every Monday and invites his Twitter followers to do the same. The competition is Tableau-centric (or maybe even exclusive) but I’m going to inject a teensy bit of Playfair into it as an excuse to make a new Playfair graph every now and then and show off some of the app’s capabilities.

This week’s visualization is pretty basic – it started out as a mildly crummy bubble chart and the obvious thing to do is to make it a bar chart. I added a tiny bit of complexity by dividing my bars into owned and chartered capacity (all available at the original datasource, alphaliner), ordering the dataset by owned capacity, and fading out the chartered portion of the bars a little bit (you don’t have to do this by bar in Playfair, you can just fade out the chartered key element by right-clicking on it). This lends some additional visual importance to owned capacity. I have no domain knowledge here so I’m not sure if this division between owned and chartered capacity is interesting, but it seemed like a significant division in the data.

Here’s my version of the visualization:

There’s nothing particularly tricky about making this in Playfair save for the order of the categories on the y-axis. Because Playfair isn’t meant to be used to manipulate data, it handles categorical data in a very simple way: it orders things as it finds them. So to get the ordering you see here, I sorted the rows of my dataset on owned TEU. Similarly, the ‘owned’ category has to occur first for Playfair to render it as the first stacked bar component. Here’s the data as it is entered into Playfair: