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Article published In: Information Design Journal
Vol. 25:2 (2019) ► pp.192–213

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Pervasive and perplexing pies

Our evolving relationship with a data display genre

 | Iowa State University
Published online: 7 July 2020
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/idj.25.2.04kos
Abstract
Although pie charts remain a highly popular genre for visualizing data, evident partly by their continued use in corporate annual reports, designers and theorists and have long critiqued and even denigrated them. This conflicted relationship with pie charts has resulted largely from their paucity of data, labeling difficulties, and perceptual weaknesses. Like many primary data design genres, however, pie charts attained their conventional status as a result of a long evolutionary process, initiated in the later nineteenth century by experimentation, hybrid forms, and data-rich designs. After the subsequent simplification and minimizing effects of twentieth-century modernism, pie charts have begun to experience a reemergence of innovation with digital data design, which has reintroduced hybridity into pie charts, vastly enlarged their data domain, and addressed at least some of their perceived weaknesses.
Article outline
  • 1.Circular forms: From nature to design
  • 2.Form and function: The geometry of pies
  • 3.Genre resilience: The ongoing popularity of pie charts
  • 4.Charts under duress: The denigration of pies
  • 5.Historical perspective: Early innovations with pies
    • 5.1Multi-tasking pies and hybrids
    • 5.2Victorian profusion of pies and sectors
  • 6.Simplified pies: Design in the age of modernism
  • 7.Re-emergence of a genre: The new-wave of digital & hybrid pies
  • 8.Conclusion: Prospects for pie charts
  • Notes
  • References
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2021. 2021 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), ► pp. 18 ff. DOI logo

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