What's the advantage of an animated bar chart compared to an area chart?
I personally think they're incredibly painful to look at but since I keep seeing them pop up on reddit I'm sure there must be advantages I haven't thought of, right?
https://observablehq.com/@d3/multi-line-chart https://observablehq.com/@jonsadka/scatterplot
A bar chart race is in many ways “worse” than a static chart. The bar chart race forces you to wait for the animation to finish, whereas a static chart shows you everything simultaneously, and lets you look forward or backward in time by just moving your eyes. This can be generalized to say that a well-designed static chart is often better than an interactive or animated chart, since in the static chart, everything is visible up-front.
But in the same way that a good visual hierarchy directs the reader’s attention and simplifies a complex interface, bar chart races (and animations more generally) are effective at getting the viewer to watch the race as it originally played out, from start to finish. Time in the data is represented as real time, so you’re only able to see a single moment in time.
So bar chart races are probably worse for most perceptual tasks, but as a storytelling device, they are (seemingly) quite effective.
IMO bar charts are better at showing relative sizes of scalar numbers as opposed to 2d shapes. A circle with twice as much area as another just doesn’t look 2x as big to me.