A black & white table about parties (you know, without the party colors)

What a day yesterday! We launched our new tables, and then you told us all on Twitter and in emails that you like them. Thank you! That was really nice to hear. If you haven’t checked out the new features, do so here. And, no surprises today, of course you’ll get a table from me:

The table continues where the last Weekly Chart from Anna left off: It’s also about the upcoming election of the EU Parliament. There will be a couple of parties in the EU Parliament, with names like EPP and ECR and ALDE. You probably haven’t heard of them, even if you are a citizen in Europe. What you’re voting for at the end of the month are not these EU parties, but your national parties – whose lucky elected members then become part of the EU parties.

In the table above, you can see all German parties that Germans could vote for in 2014 and that have at least one representative in the EU Parliament to date.

Chart choices

Those German parties all have colors. Party colors. Very colorful party colors. Colors I’ve written about before, at length, in a very colorful article.

It’s easier to recognize parties if you use their colors in a table like the one above. I know that. And I tried, I really did. But, you know, I’m more like a color minimalist. One, two colors and I’m happy. These party colors were waaay too colorful for me.

So I removed all the colors – and was left with the hard-to-skim party names, all in the same font. That wasn’t ideal either. But then I thought: Maybe typography (meaning, the individual party logos) can help me bring recognizability back?

The answer, in my humble opinion, is yes. Or at least I’m happy with the result: A table that’s easy-ish to skim while staying classy (= black & white)(and a screaming neon green).

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We’re looking forward to seeing what you create with our tables! If you built a table you’re proud of and want to tell others about your thinking process behind it in a Weekly Chart, do get in touch with me at lisa@datawrapper.de. I’ll see you next week!