Illegal Arrivals to Australia

This article on Yahoo by the AFP has an interesting graphic on the problem facing Australia of illegal arrivals via boat that, in part, probably cost Kevin Rudd and the Labor Party of Australia the recent election.

I like the overall graphic, but I feel that the data labels are unnecessary on the line chart and the bar chart. They distract from the overall shape of the data and are anyways hinted at by the axes labels within the charts themselves. Also, I am a bit unclear as to the meaning of the grey bars in the line chart.

Credit for the piece goes to John Saeki.

Author: Brendan Barry

I am a graphic designer who focuses on information design. Most recently I worked for the Economic Research Department of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia and prior to that I was Head of Design at Euromonitor International with my design team split between Chicago and London. View all posts by Brendan Barry