bullet graphs galore
Our November challenge was inspired by a recent workshop question about bullet graphs. We invited the community to find some data of interest and build their own bullet graph. More than three dozen members tackled this less familiar chart type in a variety of tools, including Excel, Tableau, Python, Illustrator, Datawrapper, PowerBI, and R.
For many challenge participants, this was their first attempt at creating a bullet graph. They discovered, as you may find yourself, that even though bullet graphs are not a typical chart type, they can be powerful in the right situation.
Traditional bullet graphs
Several participants created traditional bullet graphs, which encode a performance measure as a bar, layered on top of a stack of bars that encode qualitative ranges.
For Jose’s first challenge, he chose to measure each region in Brazil against the country’s overall GDP per capita to highlight the richest and poorest regions.
Housing costs in the U.S. were the topic of Alyssa’s submission, highlighting cities within “cost-burdened” ranges.
Diewertje looked at Canadian province guidelines for COVID-19 nasopharyngeal swab depth against the effective insertion depth. Her design included a detailed legend and a cotton swab that cleverly represented each province’s guideline.
Simplified bullet graphs
Bullet graphs were developed as an alternative to meters and gauges found on dashboards. However, the dense display can be difficult to read. Multiple entries provided a more simplified version that did not include background banding.
In his visual about women’s soccer expected goals, Gary opted to employ a bar chart for the performance metric, with a simple vertical line marking the target. With the thoughtful application of color, he made it easy to find the single team in the league that was meeting expectations.
Another common version of a stripped-down bullet graph includes two bars laid atop one another—a narrower one used for the performance measure and a wider one representing a comparison measure.
Jill used a bar-in-bar bullet graph to show U.S. progress towards 2030 sustainable development goals for gender equality.
Bullet graphs to show change
Some entries prove that bullet graphs can be used for more than measuring against a target or goal—they can also compare change between two groups.
Charles submitted a bullet graph to show that monthly 2020 temperatures in Montreal were often warmer than 2019, and multiple months were drier compared to the previous year.
Stefan utilized a bullet graph to display the changes in Likert scale survey response data between two points in time.
